THE BEQUEST OF MATO LOVRAK AT THE CROATIAN SCHOOL MUSEUM

The permanent exhibition at the Croatian School Museum includes a separate section with a faithful reconstruction of the study of the author and teacher Mato Lovrak. The furniture, the library, various objects and photographs are part of the valuable bequest of the well-known children’s author that was given to the museum by the author’s daughter Đurđica Lovrak Vujasinović. The second part of the bequest, which is not on exhibition but accessible to the public and to users, contains books, original photographs and an especially valuable legacy of manuscripts - The Mato Lovrak Personal Holdings - kept at the Collection of Archives at the Croatian School Museum. The archives also hold personal documents, documents relating to school and public activities, original manuscripts, correspondence, newspaper clippings, autobiographies, reviews and bibliographies, as well as illustrations and other material relating to Lovrak’s works. The archive holdings span the period between 1909 and 1974 and are kept in 37 archive boxes. The personal archive has been treated according to archival principles and an analytical inventory has been drawn up (The Inventory of the Manuscript Bequest of Mato Lovrak). Lovrak’s bequest at the Croatian School Museum is especially valuable because of its diversity and, more or less, integral quality, which allows us a clearer insight into the mode of work and the time in which the author worked. Original manuscripts with the author’s “interventions”, a numerous correspondence, documents and photographs are sources for interdisciplinary research and analyses from various aspects. The structure itself and the contents of what has been preserved bear witness to things that were important to the author, and the fact that he was a teacher, a popular children’s author who is still mandatory reading in Croatian schools, and that he lived in the building of the Croatian Teachers’ Hall, have deÞ ned the Croatian School Museum as the logical choice for keeping his bequest