Sam Lemley is Curator of Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries (CMU), an Affiliate in the Center for Early Modern Print, Networks, and Performance (CMU Department of English), and a member of the Print & Probability project. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Virginia and an MLIS with a certificate of concentration in rare books and special collections librarianship from the Palmer School (NYC). At CMU he administers acquisitions, exhibitions, research, and instruction in the Libraries’ collection of rare books, manuscripts, and early calculating devices and cryptographic machines. He is a (re)founding member of The Pittsburgh Bibliophiles, a gardener, a book collector, and papa to a four-year-old son.

Lemley has held research fellowships at Princeton University Libraries, the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Rare Book School, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. His work has appeared in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, The Library, Studies in Bibliography, Shakespeare Quarterly, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Hyperallergic, and other journals. In 2023 Lemley edited a book on the four Folios of Shakespeare’s plays (Penn State University Press). The volume accompanied a pair of exhibitions mounted at CMU and the Frick Pittsburgh. In 2025 Lemley published Rare Books & Ancestral Machines — a portable and richly illustrated guide to the Posner Center for Special Collections at CMU.

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samlemley[at]cmu[dot]edu