SF Signal: The World's Largest SF/F/H Collection

The World's Largest SF/F/H Collection

With nearly 350,000 items, the University of California Riverside’s J. Lloyd Eaton Science Fiction Collection, started in 1969, is said to be the largest in the world.

Anatomy of Wonder estimates the Eaton Collection at 295,000 items, but that’s old news, Slusser said -- and it’s a rather conservative estimate in any case; a recent acquisition of thousands of science fiction fan magazines from UCLA puts the total at close to 350,000. The collection includes original manuscripts, periodicals, magazines, comic books, literary papers and much more memorabilia. Housed in the library’s Special Collections Department, the collection holds 90 percent of English-language science fiction, fantasy and horror published in the 20th century, plus a wide range of works in Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German and 12 other languages.

The collection was established at UC Riverside in 1969, when Oakland physician J. Lloyd Eaton, a prominent West Coast science fiction fan who hobnobbed with the likes of authors Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, left his 6,000-book collection to the university. Then-UCR librarian Eleanor Montague saw it as the nucleus of something that could become much bigger, Slusser said. It has since assimilated several other large collections and is growing by thousands of items per year.