The Richard Balzer Pre-Cinema Collection spans roughly 300 years of optical devices and illusions that explore illumination, projection and persistence of vision. It is one of the most comprehensive collections documenting optics and pre-cinema and includes anamorphoses, metamorphics, hand shadows, dioramas and panoramas, peep shows and much more.

Material housed in Graphic Arts, Photographs and Special Collections includes thousands of individual items, encompassing both textual documentation of pre-cinema optical devices and illusions as well as illustrated works. Forms of material include advertisements, broadsides, correspondence, ephemera, glass slides and negatives, postcards, printed material, programs, puzzles, tickets, and more. In addition, there are optical toys, including handmade flipbooks, and cylinders, discs, and other objects that were used in the optical devices.

The collection of rare books and publications, housed in the library’s Technical Services Department, includes a wide variety of the most important works on optics and perspective covering 400 hundred years of research from the early 17th to early 21st century. There are more than 600 monographic publications that encompass scholarship on optically illustrated illusions as well as hundreds of periodicals, catalogs and pamphlets, and a large selection of pop-up books.