Hoover Institution Library: Ephemeral and Rare Materials at the Hoover Library

News: Ephemeral and Rare Materials at the Hoover Library

Cover of the serial Viestnik Atamantsev, Asnières, France, 1936

The pamphlet and rare book collections are among the Hoover Library's most interesting and valuable holdings.

Pamphlets, which reflect the times that gave birth to them, are rarely to be found after their brief lives, making them extremely valuable to scholars. In the years since its inception in 1919, the Hoover Library has collected approximately 140,000 pamphlets, making it one of the few institutions in the world to preserve these ephemeral items. Hoover Library's pamphlets cover mostly political and social issues and events, among them the evolution of parties and movements, that shaped our past. They can truly be considered to be multum in parvo.

The pamphlets included in the collection come from all areas of Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and North America. The Hoover Library recently resumed cataloging and preserving this collection, and the catalog is available online.

Another important collection of rare materials owned by the Hoover Library are its Russian art books. Many of these were collected by the first Russian curator, Frank Golder, in the years following the 1917 Revolution.

Plate from A. Benois's Tsarskoe selo, St. Petersburg, 1910

Title page of the "Russkiia narodniia kartinki"

Title page of Russkiia narodniia kartinki sobral i opisal D. Rovinskii, St. Petersburg, 1881

Among them are such valuable and beautiful volumes as Alexandre Benois's Tsarskoe selo (St. Petersburg, 1910); Al'bom 200-lietniago iubileia imperatora Petra Velikago 1672-1872 (St. Petersburg, 1872); I. N. Bozherianov's Nevskii prospekt (St. Petersburg, 1901); V. Durasov's Rodoslovnaia kniga vserossiiskago dvorianstva (St. Petersburg, 1906); Obshchii Gerbovnik Dvorianskikh Rodov vserossiiskiia imperii nachatii v 1797-m godu (St. Petersburg, 1798); Russkiia narodniia kartinki sobral i opisal D. Rovinskii (St. Petersburg, 1881); and Istolkovaniia aglinskikh zakonov G. Blakstona, perevedenniia po vsevisochaishemu povelieniiu Velikoi zakonodatel'nitsi vserossiiskoi s podlinnika aglinskago (1780).