The City Tech Science Fiction Collection

The City Tech Science Fiction Collection is located in the Archives of the Ursula C. Schwerin Library of the New York City College of Technology, CUNY in downtown Brooklyn, New York.

The collection is an anonymous gift to City Tech from a science fiction scholar who curated one of the most impressive collections of science fiction.

At over 600 linear feet in size, the collection includes monographs, anthologies, over 4000 magazines, scholarly journals, and novels.

Two-thirds of the back row of the collection includes monographs on science fiction, American popular culture, Cold War studies, film studies, and more.

The science fiction anthologies begin in the last third of the first row of shelves. The anthologies include a wide variety of one-offs and many series such as Clarion, Chrysalis, Dimension, Universe, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and The Hugo Winners.

Next, the 4000 plus magazines are shelved on the second and third rows. They include Amazing Stories, Astounding/Analog, Galaxy, If, Imagination, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There are many short-lived series, too, including Hugo Gernsback’s Science Fiction Plus. The oldest magazine in the collection is a 1929 Amazing Stories Quarterly and the latest issues are in the early 2000s.

Following the magazines are the science fiction scholarly journals, which include Science-Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and the SFRA Review.

The remainder of row three and all of row four and five are science fiction novels.

Due to the limitations of time, the collection was shelved as it was unboxed, and finding aids are being created for identifying where items are on the shelves. I completed the finding aid for the magazines during the summer of 2016.

The City Tech Science Fiction Collection is a working collection, meant to be used by scholars for research and professors in classes.

[jimeagle]

I had almost every digest from 1950 to 1980 and offered it to Auburn university. Hundreds of pulps also. They said no. So now I'm selling them on eBay. Using the money to buy paperbacks now.

[thomasciarlariello]

What about illustrators Chris Moore, Chris Foss, Peter Elson, Tim White, etc.?