Two Libraries Under One Name

The awkward compound name is the point of it. The Saxon State and University Library Dresden is two institutions that agreed to become one, and the title was built so that neither tradition disappeared into the other. The state library side traces its collections to the electoral private library begun in 1556 and had been the state library of Saxony since 1917; it was the only one of the state libraries in the German Democratic Republic to keep that function. The university library side served the Technische Universitat Dresden. The two merged in August 1996, and in August 2002 the combined institution opened a new central building on the university campus, which brought the two inventories physically together for the first time.

Between those dates lies the reason the merger mattered. The war left the state library holding about 55,000 volumes and working out of the former house of a singers' society. Everything the library is now was rebuilt from that base. The Deutsche Fotothek, the photographic archive, was later attached to it as a department.

For this atlas the library is a custodian and not a subject. It is here because one book in its manuscript collection is one of the four Maya books that survived the sixteenth century, and because what happened to that book in Dresden is now part of the book's own record rather than a footnote to it.