Books that record the development of contacts between Native peoples and Europeans, beginning with Columbus, form the major portion of the Ayer collection. Here one can find a practically complete collection of publications dealing with the voyages of Columbus, his possible predecessors, and his successors.
The Ayer collection has a broad geographic scope: works on the contact between American Indians and Europeans throughout all of the Americas are collected.
The Ayer collection's broad scope allows researchers to see the American reconnaissance as part of the larger history of the voyages of exploration. These early voyage materials have a four-fold significance. First, they set the American explorations in the larger context. Second, they contain some of the earliest known records of particular American voyages. Third, they serve to record the spread of knowledge about America, which was a primary incentive to further exploration and eventually colonization. And finally, practically all of these voyages include some notices about the Native inhabitants.
Of early voyages, for example, the Ayer Collection has the following: DeBry's Great Voyages and Small Voyages; Hakluyt's Divers Voyages and Principal Navigations; Eden's Decades; and multiple editions of Francanzano da Montalboddo.
The Ayer collection includes about 2,000 separately printed maps, 500 atlases, and 300 manuscript maps that document the development of geography and cartography of the Western Hemisphere. Prominent among these holdings are the famous Ayer-Stevens Ptolemy Collection, a large collection of portolan atlases and charts, and nearly 800 photographs of manuscript maps relating to America collected by Professor Louis Karpinski in 1926 from French, Spanish, and Portuguese archives.