Few people are aware of the vast collective resource of rare books, manuscripts, and related objects housed in Los Angeles-area libraries. Featuring more than three hundred selections from area collections, The World from Here explores this treasure trove of rare books and ephemera.

Included are materials ranging from a 1482 atlas to fiction classics, early botanical and scientific texts, letters, posters, and artists' books. Selections were culled from nearly forty institutions, including the Huntington Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Public Library and libraries at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California. Essays on libraries in the American West, the history of book collecting in Los Angeles, and library buildings in Los Angeles during the twentieth century make The World from Here an engaging study of this impressive yet little-known cultural resource.

This book catalogues an exhibit held at the UCLA Hammer Museum in winter 2001-2002.

Cynthia Burlingham is senior curator at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and deputy director of collections at the UCLA Hammer Musuem. Bruce Whiteman is head librarian at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. Nicholas Barker is editor of The Book Collector. Ken Breisch is director of Programs in Historic Preservation in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. Anthony Grafton is Dodge Professor of Early Modern European History at Princeton University.

This title is out of print. Please look for it at your local libraries and/or used bookstores.