Voltaire: The Martin J. Gross Collection in The New York Public Library

The Library’s Martin J. Gross Collection ranks very near the top of all Voltaire collections in the libraries of North America. Its holdings include virtually all of Voltaire’s major publications, a great many in first editions or in editions showing significant signs of revision. Numerous publications about Voltaire by his contemporaries—about 175 titles in all—provide part of the background against which Voltaire worked with extraordinary energy as a philosopher, poet, novelist, dramatist, historian, popularizer of science, legal advocate, satirist, and champion of intellectual freedom. This checklist of the collection’s holdings (as of 2008) will serve to make this resource better known to scholars and students throughout the world and to encourage their exploitation of it.

This publication also includes introductory texts by Library President Paul LeClerc, collector Martin J. Gross, and antiquarian bookdealer Stephen Weissman describing the formation of the collection, how it came to the Library, and its ongoing development.