The interest of German writers and readers in the Western Hemisphere dates back to the earliest narratives of the transatlantic Encounter. One of the first Latin editions of the Columbus letter was printed at Basel in 1493, and a German translation appeared in print in 1497. By the late sixteenth century, German publishers were issuing American travel narratives in impressive series. The biological and mineral resources of the Americas had a substantial impact on German science, and the American populations stimulated new religious and ethnographic writing. German explorers drafted expedition reports, and actual settlements began in the seventeenth century, later hosting their own German presses.

The John Carter Brown Library has long been acknowledged as a substantial resource for this material. Philip M. Palmer's German Works on America (1952) noted that the JCB had "the largest number of works written in German about America" among the forty-seven major collections he had studied for the period 1492-1800. Palmer enumerated 967 different works, and nearly doubled the number of entries by listing other editions and variants. The Library itself began systematic study of its German Americana collection with the planning of a three-volume printed catalogue, publishing in 1988 a pilot edition for the period 1493-1618 under the title Die Wunderbare Neue Welt: German Books and Related Materials about the Americas in the John Carter Brown Library, 1493 to 1840. A second volume for the years 1619 to 1763 is now nearing completion; the two volumes contain some 1,100 descriptions. When complete in three volumes, the catalogue will serve as a valuable guide to the digitized material.