The Library yearbooks consist of reference copies of every exhibition catalogue produced by the museum since 1862, bound by year. After about 1937, the yearbooks also include copies of all printed material generated by the museum, including exhibition announcements, newsletters, press releases, and event invitations.

Artists’ books are works of art realized in the form of a book. They are often published in small editions, though sometimes they are produced as one-of-a-kind objects. The Library’s collection of more than 550 artists’ books includes seminal works like Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, as well as lesser-known works by emerging and local artists.

An illustrated book may be a work in which a visual artist adds his or her illustrations to an established literary text, such as Ronald King’s specially designed images which accompany the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; or may represent a collaboration between a writer and a visual artist in the co-creation of a new work, like Christopher Logue and John Christie’s Red Bird.

Amassed since the 1960s, the museum’s Special Ephemera Collection consists of approximately 750 individual pieces of material—invitations, announcements, tickets, programs, cards, and publication notices—that were selected because of their unusual form or format. One example is an invitation to a Marcel Duchamp exhibition that is printed on the handle of a plastic ice-scraper. 

Ranging from the amusing to the elegant, the items in the Special Ephemera Collection document the lives and careers of contemporary artists, as well as the galleries that represented them. These items are a resource for the study and understanding of the nation’s artistic past, particularly of the lesser-known galleries and emerging/non-mainstream artists that represent the majority of the items in the collection.

Ranging from documentary style recordings of sound installations to avant-garde compositions, audio cassettes and records in this collection document, in particular, American artists’ engagements with sound from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.