The Juvenile Collection, built through the generosity of many individual donors, has been steadily growing to its present size of over 1,000 volumes. Though it contains some eighteenth-century works, the collection is composed for the most part of 19th- and early 20th-century material. Primers, songbooks, folk tales, and fairy tales provide excellent source materials for the study of social history, psychology, literature, and book illustration.

In recent years, literature on the education of children, particularly of girls, has been collected to support the Education Department curriculum at Wellesley. Works by Thomas Bewick and his American follower, Alexander Anderson, the Dalziel brothers, Gustave Doré, Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, and Randolph Caldecott are among the offerings of the Juvenile Collection.

Shown: Tales told in Holland, 1926