COLLECTION OF RARE BOOKS

The book collection of the Museum Society contains 13.000 items in its main fund. In the manuscript collection amounting about 700 items there are
- manuscripts in Latin, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian;
- stone medallions with inscriptions in Turkish,
- parchment manuscripts from Samaria and Ethiopia,
- clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions,
- Indian manuscripts on palm leaves,
- Greek manuscripts on papyrus;
- Polish, Ukrainian and Russian inscriptions on birch bark.
The Museum collection broadly covers books of West European printing: there are 8 incunabulas of 15th cent.; books on theology, law, philosophy, arts and world history; encyclopedias and dictionaries, fiction.
In the Museum book fund there are more than 200 Slavonic line-print records of 16-18th centuries. The Museum book collection contains several priceless issues of Ivan Fyodorov – the printing pioneer.
Firstly, there is the famous Moscow "Apostle" of 1564 which is the first Russian dated printed book. Also we have Ivan Fyodorovitch’s masterpiece – the Bible of Ostrog (1581). Only 250 copies of it have been preserved in the world. The Ivanovo Museum collection has two of them.