Ancient Collections of the Malesherbes Library
The Malesherbes Library specialises in Germanic and Nordic studies, Slavic studies, Italian studies, classic and modern humanities, and applied foreign languages. Its collections are the result of the fusion of the UFR libraries and the university library established at the Grand Palais until 1999. Since then, the collections have been enriched with heritage ones which come from donations from lecturers and researchers.
The precise mapping of the ancient collections - before 1924 - is underway. The collections gather together nearly 13,000 documents. The oldest work is a Florentine edition of the collection of short stories by Boccacio “Il decameron” (The Decameron), from 1527.
Among the remarkable documents are the typescript and never-before-published memoirs by Otto Grautoff (1876-1937) Ein deutsch-französiches Leben : die Bilanz einer Generation (A French-German life: the outcome of a generation). Otto Grautoff was a German art historian who specialised in French painter Nicolas Poussin. A huge Francophile, he worked to improve French-German relations by creating the Deutsch-Französische Gesellschaft association. In addition, during his adolescence, he was very close to writer Thomas Mann with whom he maintained a correspondence. His memoirs, which were completed in France around 1937, arrived to us through Germanist Henri Lichtenberger (1864-1941).
This typescript is the first document of the Malesherbes Library to be digitised and uploaded.
