The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens is home to one the world's great independent research libraries, with more than nine million items spanning the 11th to 21st century. The Library’s collection includes rare books, manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, and other materials in the fields of British and American history and literature. Only a tiny portion of this number is on display at any one time.

Major items on display include the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Gutenberg Bible (one of only 14 in the world), Shake­speare’s First Folio, John James Audubon’s Birds of America, and Henry David Thoreau’s manuscript of Walden. Renovations to the Exhibition Hall itself - a space that first opened in 1920 - provide a spectacular setting for the treasures while reflecting the building’s historic past.