Gli stampati: la formazione della «Prima Raccolta» e i suoi cataloghi

At the beginning of the Seventeenth century the Vatican Apostolic Library owned only few hundred of printed books. At the end of the century the printed books had grown to over 12.000. The historical archive of the Library allows to reconstruct the ways of this great increase. The core acquisitions were realized through quantity and cash purchase on the Roman, Italian and international market. During the Thirhy Years’ War the pope received the Palatine Library of Heidelberg as a gift. Whole private libraries were gifted or inherited or bought. A minor part of the books were gifted by the popes or exchanged through barter with librarians or religious institutions. The Library organized her own bindery and compiled a considerable series of topographic and alphabetic inventories and catalogues of the printed books. Going through the topographic catalogue compiled at the end of the century by Giorgio Grippari we have a conspicuous look of the Library’s holdings.