The Reese room is located on the second floor of Reese Library, on the Augusta University Summerville campus. The room houses the library's rare book collections, and was donated by Mary Katherine Reese Pamplin when the library was built in 1977.
Designed to look like a 19th century private library, the Reese Room acts as a museum room, and features period furniture. As a result, the room has no workspaces for researchers.
As a genre, travel literature comes in many varieties--encompassing guidebooks, nature writing, and travel memoirs. People have been writing travel literature since at least the 2nd century CE, and it steadily increased in popularity during the middle ages, when many traveled for religious purposes.
The majority of the travel books in the Reese Room rare book collection are comprised of travel literature from the 18th-20th centuries. The majority of our collection's 18th century travel literature is written by British authors traveling largely in European cultures, and reflects the 17th-18th century tradition of the "Grand Tour." Many wealthy British and European men, and some women, traveled throughout Europe on a "Grand Tour," often focusing their itineraries on viewing historical sites from antiquity, i.e. ancient Greece and Rome.
Much of the travel literature in our collection dating from the late 19th and early 20th century was produced by western authors, often from Great Britain, and often focused on British colonies in Africa, and the East. These travel narratives reflect the author's position within the system of Imperialism in place at the time.
