Cultural assets saved
City Library: Incunabula and early prints have been restored
Valuable exhibits from the City Library's cultural assets have been restored and thus preserved for posterity. The Chemnitz City Library's application for funding from the Coordination Centre for the Preservation of Written Cultural Assets was again approved in 2022.
With the funding provided, seven severely damaged volumes have now been restored. These include a total of seven incunabula, which were printed with movable metal type using the Gutenberg process and thus date back to the experimental early phase of book printing up to 1500. A further six titles labelled as "early prints" are included.
Among the incunabula, works by the Roman Catholic Church's important ecclesiastical scholar Thomas Aquinas were saved: his main work "Summa Theologica" and "Catena aurea", his commentary on the four Gospels.
Collections of sermons by the famous Franciscan Bernardine of Siena and the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux are now also available for future generations.
Among the early printed works, Plutarch's "Vitae virorum illustrium", printed in 1514, in which biographies of a famous Roman and a famous Greek are compared, and Franciscus Barbarus' work "De re uxoria libelli duo" from 1513/14 are worth mentioning.
The origin of the text dates back to Lorenzo di Medici's marriage to Ginevra Cavalcanti in 1415. Barbarus wrote a treatise on the choice and nature of a wife for this social event.
In 2022, the book sponsorships initiated for decades by the association "Förderer der Stadtbibliothek Chemnitz" e. V. made further restorations possible. Six titles from the cultural heritage collection were saved.
Both the Coordination Centre for the Preservation of Written Cultural Assets and the initiatives of the "Förderer der Stadtbibliothek Chemnitz" e. V. association are important, indispensable supporters in the preservation of the rich cultural and scientific heritage of the city of Chemnitz, whose existence is endangered, as well as nationwide for the whole of Germany.