The Karpeles Manuscript Museum recently opened in St. Augustine's historic downtown | Karpeles Manuscript Museum
Published on July 6, 2026 at 1:21 pm
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A new museum has opened in St. Augustine — the Karpeles Manuscript Museum.
The museum’s new St. George Street location will become the main home for a collection containing more than 1 million historical documents dating from the turn of the millennium to the Revolutionary War to now.
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Since opening last week, the musem has welcomed more than 3,500 visitors, museum Director Wayne Jackson says.
The museum has several locations in the Northeast U.S., but the goal is to phase those out, as the organization did with its former Jacksonville location, and turn St. Augustine into its new base of operations.
The museum’s wide variety of documents can be attributed to David Karpeles, who began collecting them in the 1970s.
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“Dr. Karpeles wandered into a museum in Southern California, saw some manuscripts there and inquired as to how they acquired them,” Jackson explained Monday on First Coast Connect on WJCT. “He learned that he could go to an auction. … He purchased his first manuscript, and the rest is history.”
Karpeles went on to open 17 museums across the U.S. to showcase the documents he collected, and the collection spans numerous topics — from letters signed by the U.S.’ founding fathers to the contract Star Trek actor William Shatner signed in the 1960s to appear on the groundbreaking science fiction series.
Not just an ‘autograph museum’
The museum’s chief operating officer, Cheryl Karpeles, one of David Karpeles’ children, says it would take a lifetime of visits to see everything the collection has to offer.
“We will have some items that will be on semi-permanent exhibit at the museum and some that will rotate through,” Cheryl Karpeles says. “Everything you see here has had an impact on our society. We are not an autograph museum.”
Cheryl Karpeles has worked with the collection since she was a teenager and says a few of her favorite items include an original copy — on crumpled, discarded paper — of the tune for Rock-a-bye Baby and a document from physicist Albert Einstein that includes a typo in his famous Theory of Relativity.
“That’s really impressive — that one of the most brilliant minds can make mistakes,” she says.
The Karpeles Manuscript Museum at 105 St. George St. is open every day of the week. Admission is free.
