Holdings

The Society's collection of printed books cover the literature of biology from 1483 to date, with especially strong collections of eighteenth and nineteenth century titles in all languages. Special areas of interest include plant and animal classification, Darwinism and the evolutionary controversy, conchology, ornithology, early mycology, expedition reports, ecology, and wildlife conservation. There is a great number of annotated books by either the author or the owner of the book.

Please use our online catalogue to explore the full range of our library holdings.

The rare books held by the Society cover a spectrum of scientific publishing from the 15th to the 19th century, with particular strengths in 16th and 17th century herbals, botanical tracts, materia medica, economic botany (especially tea and the tea trade), and lavishly produced prestige works of botanical and zoological illustration. All told they form one of the most important collections of rare natural history publications outside of a major research library, and their well-documented provenance as the property of an 18th-century learned society make them an invaluable resource for scholars of the history of science.

All the Society's rare and early printed books have been catalogued and can be searched for via our online catalogue. Work to retrospectively improve the quality of our rare books cataloguing is ongoing.

A significant number of books from the private library of Carl Linnaeus have been digitised, and can be examined on our dedicated, open access platform, Linnean Online.