Frederick and Patricia Shroyer Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Collection

The collection consists of approximately 2,189 cataloged hardcover volumes of science fiction and fantasy, together with uncataloged later additions of magazine tearsheets and periodical issues. The books date from 1831 to the late twentieth century, with the greatest concentration falling between the 1890s and 1945. Frederick B. Shroyer assembled the collection over roughly fifty years, and it reflects both his scholarly interest in the genre and a collector's attention to first and early editions.

The heart of the collection is the emergence and early development of science fiction. It documents the nineteenth-century scientific romance in the work of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells; the gothic, weird, and supernatural fiction that grew up alongside it, including Bram Stoker, Robert W. Chambers, and Arthur Machen; lost-race and hollow-earth adventures; utopian and future-war narratives such as those of Edward Bellamy and Frank R. Stockton; and the pulp-era planetary adventure that carried the genre into the twentieth century, well represented by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Garrett P. Serviss. Marie Corelli and other popular authors of the period round out the literary picture. Supporting works of popular science, along with threads of fantasy, mystery, western, and romance fiction, extend the collection beyond science fiction proper.

Received as a gift in 1981, the collection was later augmented by approximately 360 short-story tearsheets from magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and by runs of thirty-one periodicals dating from 1897 to 1909, materials that document the magazine culture in which much early science fiction first reached its readers. These tearsheets and periodicals remain uncataloged and are housed separately. The hardcover volumes were inventoried in part against Everett F. Bleiler's Checklist of Science-Fiction and Supernatural Fiction and are cataloged individually. The collection is maintained as a component of the larger Willis E. McNelly Science Fiction Collection.

Together the materials support research into the history and evolution of science fiction and fantasy as popular literary genres, the transatlantic development of the scientific romance, and the transition from Victorian speculative fiction to the twentieth-century pulps.