National Library of France
The BnF
Rare Books Reserve
Pline, Historia naturalis. Venice. 1472
© BnF
The Rare Book Reserve houses the BnF's most precious printed books, from the beginning of movable-type printing in the 15th century to the most contemporary typographic productions. This collection includes:
The Rare Book Reserve is an encyclopaedic collection housing documents on the following issues:
A collection of nearly 10 000 reference books about the history of books and libraries is available in free access in Room Y.
The database of bookbindings:reliures.bnf.fr
The reliure.bnf.fr database provides access to a selection of digitized bindings belonging to the Rare Book Reserve's collection. It should be regularly enriched in the future. Three search modes are possible: by binding, by workshop and bookbinder, and by owner. The database is provided with essential complements: a bibliography, a glossary and links to major online resources in the field of bookbinding.
BP16 database, containing 16th c. works published in Paris
BP16 database contains 10,000 records from the Bibliographie des éditions parisiennes du 16e siècle compiled from the manuscripts of Philippe Renouard's collection donated to the Bibliothèque nationale in 1952.
History of the department
The Reserve’s origins merge with those of the National Library and the work of one man, Joseph Van Praet, the “guardian of printed materials”, who, in around 1792, undertook to extract rare volumes from the collections of the former Royal Library, which had grown considerably as a result of revolutionary confiscations.
Following two centuries of growth in its premises on rue de Richelieu, the Rare Books Reserve became a department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1995, and was transferred to the François Mitterrand Library (Site François-Mitterrand) when the Library’s collections of printed materials moved there.
The Reserve housed nearly 50 000 volumes when Joseph Van Praet died in 1837. Today, its collection includes nearly 200 000 pieces.
Thursday, October 30, 2014
See also
Collections by subjectsContact
Jean-Marc Chatelain