The Cary Collection [1] is one of the country's premier libraries on the history and practice of printing.The original collection of 2,300 volumes was assembled by the New York City businessman Melbert B. Cary, Jr. during the 1920s and 1930s.
Cary was director of Continental Type Founders Association, a former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. His professional and personal interests in printing led him to collect printer's manuals and type specimens, as well as great books of the printer's art.
In 1969, the Cary Collection was presented to RIT by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust as a memorial to Mr. Cary, together with funds to support use of the collection. Today the library houses some 20,000 volumes and a growing number of manuscripts and correspondence collections. Also included are impressive holdings on bookbinding, papermaking, type design, calligraphy and book illustration. The goal of developing the digital image database is to enable users all over the world to sample the wealth of rich materials housed in the collection.
Though many of the volumes in the library are rare, the Cary Collection has maintained, from the beginning, a policy of liberal access for all students and especially those enrolled in the School of Print Media [2]. An additional feature is the inclusion in the school's curriculum of several courses which actually meet in the library. The Collection's holdings are also available to outside researchers. While use is strictly supervised and nothing in the Collection circulates, all of its resources may be examined and studied, a priceless opportunity for students who are preparing for careers in the graphic arts.
The development of the Cary Collection into a nationally recognized graphic arts resource has been dramatically boosted during the last twenty years by a number of major gifts. In 1982, for example, The New York Times Museum of the Recorded Word was donated. In 1983, through the generosity of the Frank M. Barnard Foundation, the Bernard C. Middleton Collection of Books on Bookbinding was acquired, the most complete collection of its kind in the world. Recent gifts include the Jonathan and Patricia England Collection of American Fine Printing, and a substantial archive documenting the work of the type and book designer Hermann Zapf.