Serendipity had a hand in forming the iconography collection of scientist and flute aficionado Dayton C. Miller, unlike his meticulous and studied approach to collecting and researching materials related to the woodwind instrument, along with examples of the instrument itself.

Part of the Library’s Dayton C. Miller Collection is an eclectic assemblage of 850 prints related to wind instruments. Miller did not purchase the prints with the same specificity and requirements he demanded of the flutes, books and music he collected. He did not seek certain artists, certain impressions, or even a chronological or geographic range of prints from different centuries. The only criterion in his selection process was that the print should include a wind instrument, preferably a flute.

A selection of about 120 prints dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries is presented for the first time in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia.

Although the collection includes such important artists as Dürer, Burgkmair, Goltzius and Hogarth, Miller was just as happy to include in his iconography collection covers of popular magazines such as Puck, American Boy, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker, and photographs of paintings in European collections in which wind instruments were represented. It simply sufficed that the prints complemented his flute collection, that they were very inexpensive, and that they added another dimension to his overall collections on flute-related materials.

The Dayton C. Miller Collection may be the largest collection of objects related to one subject in the musical arts ever assembled. The Miller Collection consists of books, prints, photographs, music, correspondence, trade catalogs, statuary and nearly 1,500 flutes and other wind instruments given to the Library by Miller in 1941.

The exhibition "As the Old Sing, So the Young Twitter" features selections from the Miller collection and is one of several featured online.

Instrument collecting in the Music Division began with the generosity of Gertrude Clarke Whittall, who gave the Library five Stradivarius instruments that formed the basis of the Cremonese Collection. The Library is also home to the Wilkins Collection of early stringed instruments and the Thai Collection of elegantly crafted Siamese-style folk instruments.