George Peabody Library

The George Peabody Library is a Johns Hopkins University library that specializes in 19th-century research. It is located on the Peabody Institute of Music site at West Mount Vernon Place in the Mount Vernon-Belvedere historic cultural neighborhood north of downtown Baltimore, Maryland, and was once the Peabody Institute of Music Library in the City of Baltimore. The materials are open to the public, as was the goal of Baltimore merchant and philanthropist George Peabody, who wanted to build a library "for the free use of all persons who want to peruse it."

The primary collection covers a wide range of topics but is heavily weighted toward the nineteenth century, in keeping with Peabody's wish for it to be "fully stocked in every area of knowledge and of the most approved literature." Religion, British art, architecture, topography, and history; American history, biography, and literature; Romance languages and literature; history of science; and geography, exploration, and travel are among the library's 300,000 volumes. First editions of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and H. L. Mencken, Diderot's 28-volume Encyclopédie, and early editions of Don Quixote, Maryland and Baltimore maps, natural history folios, the first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, and fore-edge books are among the highlights of the collection.

Location: 17 E. Mount Vernon PlaceBaltimore, Maryland