Inside the UB Libraries

This webinar focuses on the UB Libraries’ renowned Rare and Special Books Collection and the Poetry Collection, with a special emphasis on the UB James Joyce Collection. Hear Associate Curator Alison Fraser, Phd '17, and Curator James Maynard, PhD '07, discuss their history and holdings and go on a virtual tour of highlights from each.​

Begun in 1935 with a donation from Thomas B. Lockwood’s personal collection, the Rare and Special Books Collection comprises more than 17,000 titles, including the four 17th-century folios of William Shakespeare, distinctive first editions, fine bindings, incunabula, and works by fine presses as well as Greek and Roman coins and original art by William Blake.

As the library of record for 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone poetry, the Poetry Collection is comprehensive in its assemblage of modern and contemporary poetry publications and holds more than 150 manuscript collections. It is also the home of the UB James Joyce Collection, the world’s largest compilation of manuscripts and other materials related to the renowned Irish author, which recently launched a James Joyce mural in downtown Buffalo for Bloomsday 2021 and announced its goal of creating a UB James Joyce Museum on South Campus.

About James Maynard and Alison Fraser
James Maynard became curator of the UB Poetry Collection—the library of record for 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone poetry—in 2016 and also serves as Coordinator of the Rare & Special Books Collection. After being appointed assistant curator of the Poetry Collection in 2009, he received tenure as associate curator in 2012 and was promoted to full librarian in 2015. He is a UB alum, earning a doctorate in English from UB. Over his nearly 20-year career, Maynard has written, edited, or contributed to more than 20 books, is the author or editor of numerous other publications, and has presented his works nationally and internationally. He was a 2020-21 Mid-American Conference Academic Leadership Development Program Fellow and a recipient of the 2021 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service.

Alison Fraser is Associate Curator of the Poetry Collection. She is a junior fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and was a 2020 New Scholar of the Bibliographical Society of America. She has published on material culture and twentieth-century poetics, special collections pedagogy, and the history of twentieth-century archives, and is the editor of The Collages of Helen Adam (Further Other Book Works / Cuneiform Press, 2017). She received a PhD in English from UB in 2017.