Slavic and Eastern European Studies

Special Collections

Criteria and Descriptions

The bibliographic access to Special Collections at the Stanford University Libraries (SUL) is facilitated through the on-line catalog.

The basic principles for designation of materials to be housed in Special Collections correspond to the criteria guiding Special Collections for all materials. A summary for Slavic materials can be stated as follows:

Imprints published prior to 1825 (an extensive but incomplete listing of these can be found in W. Zalewski, Slavic and East European Collections at the Stanford University Libraries. Stanford, 1987:29-62)
Special editions due to their rarity and/or artistic character: fine printing, binding, illustrations, selected first editions, special editions such as commemorative editions
Materials with important inscriptions and exlibris artists' books (listed below)
Manuscripts (listed below)
Ephemera, especially those treated as collections (listed below)
Collections of materials not suitable for open stack due to their collective rather than individual value, e.g., collections of literary texts, photographs, as well as material of special interest such as Slavic book dealer catalogs
Reference materials pertaining to the above categories of materials.

A. Manuscript Collections

SUL holds very few manuscript collections in the Slavic fields. The majority of archival materials are at Hoover and can be identified through Socrates, Hoover's printed catalogs (see collections) and its in-house card catalog, and guides. Although Hoover archives are primarily oriented toward politics and history, there are also significant collections in Russian, and some Polish, literature.

Stanford's Russian holdings are listed in S.A. Grant, J.H. Brown, The Russian Empire And The Soviet Union. A Guide To Manuscript And Archival Materials In The United States. Boston, G.K. Hall, 1981. See also Hoover and other publications under Collections.

See major literary manuscript collections

B. Print and Non Print Collections

In this category there is the SLAVIC BOOK TRADE ARCHIVE 1915-1995, call number M536), consisting of some correspondence with book dealers as well as book dealer catalogs including a full set of Antikvarnyi katalog of Mezhdunarodnaia kniga. A part of the Konstantinoff archives is also relevant for the book trade.

Another collection, which is currently being cataloged, can be searched in Socrates, the online catalog (click on "Catalog" top of this page), by individual title or retrieved by subject: post perestroika miscellaneous imprints. For a partial alphabetical listing with some additional description see Post perestroika miscellaneous imprints.

Please see also "Russian 1990's popular culture serials" (currently being catalogued) which can be searched in Socrates under this subject. This collection consists of multi subject popular culture publications, including samples of glossy journals.

C. Books

Special Collections contain a significant number of uncataloged items which can be found item by item in Socrates. An assessment of holdings, both cataloged and non cataloged collections, cannot be conducted at this time. Indications of holdings are as follows:

A list of cataloged materials in several classes of the Library of Congress classification system is included (LC Class).

Among the Pre-19th century imprints Special Collections holds about 30 titles printed in the Czech lands, nearly 100 in Poland and about 50 in Russia. There are many rare and fine imprints, especially Russian, from the 19th century. Among the 20th century Russian holdings there are many autographed editions.

There is a selected collection of books by futurist and symbolists. Information about them can be found in L. Fleishman, Poetry And Revolution In Russia, 1905-1930. Stanford, 1989. Numerous fine and rare editions of poetry books of the 1920s are also available.

Special mention can be made of prisoners' poetry published by Moscow's publishing house Vozvrashchenie.

There are holdings of important underground literary journals (typewritten)Chasy, Leningrad 1976- and Obvodnyi kanal. , Leningrad, 1982- (both incomplete).

Some Russian children's books as well as maps are held in Special Collections.

Last modified: June 27, 2005