Paul Needham (born 1943) is an American academic librarian. From 1998 to 2020, he worked at the Scheide Library at Princeton University. A Guggenheim Fellow and Bibliographical Society Gold Medallist, Needham has delivered the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge, the A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford. His focus is on incunabula, the earliest printed books in Europe.

In his role as an expert on incunabula, Needham has assisted investigations into forgeries, including tracking down a stolen letter by Christopher Columbus and assisting Nick Wilding in exposing the forged early edition of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius. Needham is also noted for his outspoken stance against the preservation and maintenance of anthropodermic books, or books bound in human skin, and is one of the most prominent voices in the rare book world against their upkeep.

After completing undergraduate and doctoral study at Swarthmore College and Harvard University, respectively, Needham worked at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, from 1970 to 1971, the Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan from 1971 to 1990, and the New York branch of Sotheby's antique brokers from 1990 to 1998. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, during his time at the Pierpont Morgan Library, which he used to fund his research on the history of bookprinting in 15th-century England.

In March 1998, Needham became the Scheide Librarian at Princeton University Library, where he was the first person to be promoted to senior librarian. He was in this position in 2014, when William H. Scheide [de; ru] bequeathed the Scheide family's full collection of rare books to Princeton. The collection included a Gutenberg Bible, an original 1776 printing of the United States Declaration of Independence, and a collection of music manuscripts signed and annotated by Johann Sebastian Bach. Needham spoke to NPR about the experience of processing and preserving such a collection, including the role of library digitization for rare early publications.

Needham was a Sandars Reader at the University of Cambridge in 2004–2005, where he lectured on the role and work of printing shops in 15th-century bookprinting. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society, an award for "individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the development" of bibliography, in 2011. In 2013, he delivered the A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania, titled "The First Quarter Century of European Printing".

Needham is a member of the Bibliographical Society of America, the American Printing History Association, and the Rare Book School. In the 1980s and 1990s, he taught several courses at the Morgan and Huntington libraries through the Rare Book School, on the subject of incunabula (early printed books). He retired from his post at the Scheide Library in 2020.

Post-retirement, he has remained active in bibliographic scholarship, holding the Lyell Readership in Bibliography at the University of Oxford in 2021 on the origins and texts of the Gutenberg Bible and returning to teaching at the Rare Book School.

Needham's scholarly focus is incunabula, or early printed books in Europe. In 1976, before he became employed himself by the Scheide Library, he noted how it was the only library outside Europe to catalogue all eighteen German Bible editions that predated Martin Luther's rise to prominence. In 1983, he took over the role of collecting the Census of Incunabula in American Libraries; its previous preparer, Frederick R. Goff, had died the previous year. Needham later published an exploration of the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue and its efforts to quantitatively catalogue surviving incunabula, considered the primary historical overview of the difficulties with estimating incunabulum survival.