At its dedication on October 3, 1960, the library contained a collection of 20,000 books, 17,000 manuscripts, more than fifty oil paintings, and 300 prints.

From the mid-1920s until his death, he devoted a great deal of his leisure time to building his collections of books and manuscripts, works of art, coins, stamps, military miniatures, firearms and edged weapons, and nautical models.

The library also owns the papers of Hollywood directors Orson Welles and John Ford, film critic Pauline Kael, the poets Sylvia Plath and Ezra Pound, and authors Edith Wharton and Upton Sinclair.

[7] The Adomeit collection ranges the entire history of human record keeping in miniature form, from cuneiform tablets of circa 2000 B.C.

[8] The Uslan Collection also contains a vast array of action figures[9] as well as other pop culture memorabilia,[10] which can be accessed through the Lilly Library Request System.

The collection contains approximately seven thousand pieces and includes all types of printed materials, such as journals, polemical pamphlets, and many other documents.

There are royal edicts, arrets, addresses, declarations, reglements, lettres patentes, rapports, ordonnances, memoires, lois, and various other titled or untitled official documents.

[14] The Mendel collection is divided into two categories: one relates to the period of geographical discovery and exploration and the other consists of additions made by the Lilly Library after the original acquisition.

It includes the great cosmographic and geographic works of Ptolemy as well as narratives of the discovery and conquest of the New World.

[16] On the 150th anniversary of his birth, the library produced an online exhibition that explores James Whitcomb Riley’s impact on American society and the 19th century literary world.

[20] The material is made up of papers relating to meetings, correspondence, drafts, conferences, periodicals and books from the Mystery Writers of America association.

[22] The Lilly Library is located on the southern side of a small square in the heart of the Indiana University Bloomington campus.