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, children's literature can be traced back to the late 1600s to early 1700s. While some children most likely consumed literature or print materials in some way prior to this period, children's literature's chronology is dependent both upon the concept of children and childhood as being distinct from adulthood, as well as the evolution of print culture, which began producing print materials written for and marketed to children during this period. Early children's literature tended to have a religious angle, such as the early Puritan books for children, for example. Children's literature came in a variety of forms-- from the religious and instructional, to adventure stories, fairy tales, and fantasy literature.
The majority of the children's literature in the Reese Room was published during the 19th century, especially during the Victorian era. This makes sense with the chronology of children's literature historically, as ideas about children and childhood took on new meaning during the Victorian era, as a result of the growing middle class, who had the money to spend on children's items that in earlier periods, and for those with smaller incomes, might have seemed frivolous.
