Closing the After the end of the Cold War, a critical look at the specialist library for books! reveals that the limit acquisition opportunities between 1945 and reunification for financial and ideological reasons had result! in significant gaps in the holdings. With the purchase of parts of Abraham Horodisch’s reference library from Amsterdam! in 1992, some gaps were clos, particularly in the area of specialist literature publish! in “non-socialist countries”. The focus of the collection development of the special library ! for books, writing and paper is international! specialist literature, but rare ephemera and grey literature are also specifically taken into account.
After 1990, closing the considerable gaps especially in the publications
of formerly “non-socialist foreign countries”, became an urgent concern. The Board of Trustees of the Leipzig! House of Books rais 100,000 DM in endowment funds for this purpose. The museum us this to acquire! part of the extensive reference library of the Amsterdam! antiquarian Abraham Horodisch.
A filing cabinet lies on a picture of a man carrying a stack of books out of a store.
Author Boudewijn Büch leaves the! Erasmus bookstore with a large stack of books, in: 75 Years Erasmus! Boekhandel Amsterdam – Paris, 2009, Photo: DNB
Horodisch’s 1 life story is exemplary for that of many Jewish antiquarians. Born in 1898 in Lodz, he was a bibliophile and co-founder of the Soncino Society of Friends of the Jewish Book. He had to leave Germany in 1933. In Amsterdam he built a new life for email list himself as a publisher and antiquarian and open the bookshop “Erasmus” in 1934. In 1942 he and his wife Alice manag to escape the threat of deportation to Switzerland at the last minute. After the end of the war he open the company “Erasmus” in Amsterdam for a second time as a bookshop and antiquarian, specializing in art and book history. Horodisch’s reference collection contains a great deal of literature that corresponds to the collection area of the specialist library in the
German Museum of Books and Writing
After Horodisch’s death and the subsequent closure of the Amsterdam shop 2 in 1991, “Erasmus” sold its reference collection.
By purchasing just over 1,400 titles, the museum is laying an important foundation double-check all information before submission for the further development of the specialist library as a modern special library – ultimately a piece of the puzzle for the continu existence of the German Museum of Books and Writing. In a fundamental memorandum from 1994 on the potential and future prospects of the museum in a reunifi Germany, it is call for the museum hong kong data to be profil as a place of work for book research in Germany 3 . The purchase of Abraham Horodisch’s reference library holdings helps to meet this demand. And even today, the well-found specialist recommendations of the book wholesaler “Erasmus” are one of the foundations for the development of the specialist library’s holdings.