The library of Julijana Normann - a review on woman\u27s books collection

Heritage institutions preserve in their archival collections precious book holdings of former associations, institutions as well as family libraries or merely their fragments. The value of these holdings consists not only of the rare, collector’s items exceptional within bibliophilic boundaries but also of the whole notion considering a history part of the specific region. By perusing the pages of family library, it is mostly about revealing its past, habits and interests of its members. Why is the library of Juliana Normann separated from a well-ordered count’s librarian holdings that had been gathered for years? Can we talk here about ‘’woman’s library’’, recognizing and noticing a ‘’lighter’’ literature? The fact that there were also collectors and readers in our region, is not less worth mentioning compared to the preserved fragments of specific family collections which witness within marks on ex libris, the expert systematized book holdings. Thus this book is often more than a book, its value surpasses its contents and even a binding value and quality, it speaks of its owners’ traces, revealing each one respectively. Museum experts thus recognize these holdings as such and the revealing of particular ‘’level’’ via owner’s note is compared to archaelogical research. For that very reason this ‘’book archaelogy’’ is, often literally, necessary due to a bad holdings condition and a large number of unknown or more precisely unrecognized parts of our cultural heritage. Unfortunately only a small part of these holdings is registered as a cultural monument and unfortunately many holdings, especially those in church communities, are unavailable to the public thus it is impossible to talk about the whole heritage book holdings of our region. A large number of librarian but also non-librarian holdings in the possession of the Osijek and Slavonian families, individuals, associations, organizations, schools, with completely or partially preserved documentation are mosaic pieces of our cultural history and must be necessarily regarded as such