Formation of Collections of Early Printed Books in Museums and Libraries: What Does “Acquisition Data” Say?

The article is devoted to the history of acquisition of the municipal and state repositories with early printed Cyrillic monuments in the 19th — 21st centuries. The aim of the research is to show the process of acquisition of the collections of state museums, archives and libraries of Russia. The author uses descriptions of the books from the catalogues published with the participation or under the guidance of experts in archaeography of the Moscow State University (MSU) named after M.V. Lomonosov. They cover the collections of the MSU Scientific Library, as well as the collections of museums, archives and libraries of Tver, Yaroslavl and Perm Regions, as well as the State Historical, Architectural and Ethnographic Museum-Reserve “Kizhi”. As a total there are involved 3953 descriptions containing information about the date and source of acquisition of the books to the repositories. The author concluded that archaeographic expeditions made a great contribution to the replenishment of the collections of the early printed Cyrillic monuments (860 books), but this contribution was not decisive. The most part of the unique monuments got into repositories as private donations or were purchased in old book shops, or during the expropriation of Church valuables. Only in the 1920s there were obtained 1068 books from the Church libraries. Significant event in the life of repositories in the twentieth century was more or less permanent redistribution of stocks between the major collections. The most part of the early printed Cyrillic books (almost half of them already introduced into scientific discourse), preserved now in the Scientific Library of the Moscow State University, was obtained not in the course of expeditionary work, but as a result of transfer of the books from the V.I. Lenin State Library of the USSR, the State Public Historical Library of Russia, the State Historical Museum and the Moscow Kremlin Museums.