B Is for Baldwin : An Alphabet Tour of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature

With over 120,000 volumes, the Baldwin Library holds more than a lifetime of reading. The Baldwin Library is a rich resource for significant discoveries about children’s literary and material culture. Over the years, Curators have found a remarkable array of objects inside the books, from locks of hair to letters to baseball cards. Many of the books have wonderful inscriptions within the main text. The Baldwin Library includes multiple editions of the same text making possible comparisons among editions, as with 300 editions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The Baldwin Library’s size and scope make it a valuable research repository that affords opportunities for examining individual texts and for studying a large and evolving corpus across time. The Baldwin Library has enabled much exciting scholarship. This volume shares wonders and wondrous stories from the Baldwin Library, narrated by scholars from a diversity of fields. Exploring this volume, readers will learn about the Baldwin Library and the evolution of children’s literature.