Other strengths

Exploration Accounts:

• Zaire
• French Africa
• Africa, India, Iraq, Israel

• Zaire MS-131
  Approximately 3000 books, pamphlets, and ephemera concerned with the colonial period of the Congo.the collection focuses on opinions of Belgian rule, works on missionary activity, dictionaries, grammars of native languages, and early works of travel in the years of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo (1885-late 1930s). Also available on film 4113, Microforms room, fourth floor of Memorial Library.
  
• French Africa MS-232
  Eighteen maps, several hundred photographs, and eleven volumes (typescript) of an official report of an exploratory expedition (1905-1907) to the Congo-Cameroon, sponsored by the French government. This is only one of only four known copies. It includes a long general description of the region, three ethnographic monographs, and separate studies on cotton growing, domestic animals and the tsetse fly. See also two albums of postcards from Belgian Congo and French Equatorial Africa (1910-25) and French African colonies (1900-1930) in MS 233-234.
  
• Africa, India, Iraq, Israel MS-119-120.
  Diary notes (1889-1905, 1923-1938) of Sir William Henry Himbury who explored these regions for the British Cotton Growing Association and other organizations. The reports include personal notes and photographs.

Positivist Church of Brazil. Collection L.
A nearly complete set (400 titles) of the publications of the Church, officially named A Igreja e Apostolado Positivista do Brasil. The collection includes many original editions from the late 19th century. The Church, founded in 1881, was an outgrowth of the earlier Postivist Association, itself founded in 1876. The two split in 1883. The Church consists of those Postivists who accepted the doctrines of August Comte not only as a set of philosophical principles, but also as a religion. The church is still active today, and has long outlasted the European positivist movement from which it sprang. This collection provides an opportunity to study both Brazilian thought and the transfer of European culture to the Americas.

Tibetan and Mongolian Blockprints
A collection of 549 items covering 350 separate titles. These materials, along with some 50 Tibetan manuscripts, 125 Mongolian lamaist blockprints, and volumes in Western languages were purchased in 1962 from the estate of Prof. Ferdinand Lessing. Virtually all the works in the collection were printed in Peking during the early 20th century and represent most of the important authors in the Gelugpa tradition, that branch of Tibetan Buddhism patronized by the Ch'ing emperors. Seventy percent of the titles are devotional works, prayers, and rituals. The remainder is divided among canonical literature, biography, history, didactic works, lexicography, bibliography, and indices. See the bibliographies Mongolian blockprints (Madison : The Libraries, 1985) and Tibetan blockprints (Madison : The Libraries, 1984) by Leonard Zwilling (Special Collections Reference Collection).

Papyrus Collection
A set of 85 documents in Greek and two in Latin (nos. 50 and 70). Transcribed and translated into English with extensive notes by P.J. Sijpesteijn in The Wisconsin Papyri I-II: 1st century B.C. - 8th century A.D. (Leiden : E. J. Brill, 1967-1977), available in the Department's Reference Room.

Vanguard Poetry (20th-century Latin America) Collection S.
About 600 booklets of Spanish poetry from the River Plata Area, many with autographs.