In 1981, Stanford Libraries acquired over 10,000 books collected over a forty-year period by Mary Schofield, who spent her career as a librarian at Hoover Library. The collection consists of illustrated children's tales, stories for young adults, and works of reference relating to her collecting areas, with a focus on works published since the late eighteenth century.

The Venezky Collection contains primers and readers published between the end of the eighteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century. Many titles are present in nearly every edition issued. In addition, there are early pamphlets, chapbooks, primers, almanacs, dictionaries, children's stories, plus works on penmanship, spelling, and phonetics.