Special Collections

The Library has two special collections, i.e. collections of books shelved separately from the main sequences:

Priebsch-Closs Collection

: August Closs

A collection of over 6,000 volumes, with the personal libraries of Professor August Closs and his father-in-law, Professor Robert Priebsch, at its core. It stretches from 1475 to the present day and includes all the Institute's incunabula, but its real strength lies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (German classicism and Romanticism), where it has notable holdings of plays (including translations from and into English), of editions, translations and parodies of Werther, and of rare and early editions of major authors of the period. Also included are journals (of which the earliest are volumes of the Monatliche Unterredungen einiger guten Freunde von allerhand Büchern [...], 1696ff.), 'Taschenbücher' and 'Almanache'. The collection also contains early German translations of Shakespeare and other English authors. Valuable Thomas Mann titles (principally from the Ida Herz bequest) and rare exile works (from a variety of sources) have been added to it subsequently.
The collection is on closed access and any reader wishing to consult items from it should ask a member of staff.

Exile Collection

This collection is shelved on the third floor and has as its nucleus the library of Professor J.M. Ritchie, though it is also attracting donations from other sources. Books in the Exile Collection, which supplement the extensive holdings of exile materials elsewhere in the Library, can be identified in the catalogue by the EX at the end of the classmark.