Support our Collections
Financial gifts to the Warburg Institute Library, Archive or Photographic Collection are very much appreciated and allow us to expand our operational activities and purchase expensive items of equipment.
Just as welcome and important, however, are donations of scholarly publications relating to any of the subject areas and historical periods falling within the scope of the Library’s collection remit.
In 2017–2018 around 35% of the total number of books accessioned by the Library were received as donations or bequests.
Recent noteworthy donations or bequests made to the Warburg Institute Library include:
- over 100 books from the library of the late Dr Joachim Strupp (mostly recent studies of Italian and German art and culture in the period from the late Roman Empire to the end of the eighteenth century);
- an early sixteenth-century edition of Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology (Marsilij Ficini florentini Platonica theologia de immortalitate animorum, Venice, 1525);
- approximately 150 books previously belonging to Professor Michael Baxandall (former lecturer and staff member of the Warburg Institute, who died in 2008) mainly in the subject areas of art history, aesthetics and perceptual psychology;
- a copy of the three-volume reference work, Die Pflanzenwelt (Leipzig, 1913–1922), written by the botanist, Otto Warburg (1859–1938), who shared a common ancestry with Aby Warburg.
Whether your donation to the Warburg Institute Library is a single monograph, or a larger collection of books on a particular topic, you are helping to maintain one of the foremost collections of research material in the world devoted to intellectual, cultural and visual history.
You are also enabling us to acquire more printed publications than our annual budget on its own allows us to do; and you are presenting a gift which will be valued, not only by today’s readers, but also by all future academic staff, students and private scholars who use the Library to carry out their research.
All books presented to the Library are given a bookplate, affixed to the inside front cover, displaying the name of the donor (unless the person has informed us that the item should be recorded as an anonymous donation).
Please consider The Warburg Institute Library next time you are publishing an academic volume that you would like to see as part of our collection, or if you have a collection of books you no longer need and wish to donate.