Sam Lemley is curator of special collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries (CMU), director of the Posner Center for Special Collections, 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 five-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.

recent projects

<article> — “Early species descriptions of two native Virginian plants in the Histoire des plantes, nouvellement trouvées en l’isle Virgine, & autres lieux (Paris, 1620)” (Archives of Natural History) (2025)

<book> — Rare Books & Ancestral Machines: A Handbook to the Posner Center for Special Collections

<book> — The Four Shakespeare Folios 1623-2023: Copy, Print, Paper, Type

<grant/collaborative project> — Print & Probability: deciphering bibliographical evidence with computational tools.

<exhibition> — From Stage to Page: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Print (2023)

<article> — Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with Computational Bibliography? New Angles on Printing Thomas Hobbes’ “Ornaments” Edition (18th-Century Studies) (2021)

<article> — “Who Rpinted Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio?,” (Shakespeare Quarterly) (2023)

<article> — “Printing Leibniz’s Calculus: Dating and Numbering the Editions of the Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis (October 1684),” (The Library) (2021)

<online exhibition> — Cipher Discs: Renaissance Encryption Machines (2021)

<essay> — On Vaccination’s Dead Metaphors (Hyperallergic) (2021)

<lecture> — Grolier Club Bibliography Week Lecture on Computational Bibliography: “Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press“ (2023)

<news> — Washington Post: “A coalition of book lovers rushes to save U-Va.’s card catalogue.”