The Collection
- More than 11 million books
- More than 200,000 rare books
- 4,442 incunabula
- 18,300 occidental manuscripts (including parts of the Nibelungenlied)
- 42,170 oriental manuscripts (including early Ming block prints)
- 250,000 autographs (including Lessing, Goethe, Kleist)
- 66,350 music autographs
- 1,400 estate archives (including the Mendelssohn family)
- 460,000 editions of sheet music
- 1.1 million maps, atlases and globes (including the world's largest bound atlas)
- 38,000 subscription periodicals and monographic series
- 180,000 early newspaper volumes
- 22,900 printed and magazines
- 24,400 licensed electronic newspapers
- 4,700 databases
- 2.3 million microfiches and microfilms
- 13.5 million images at the Prussian Heritage Image Archive
Among the library’s most precious treasures are the Psalter of Ludwig the German (German: Psalter Ludwigs des Deutschen) dating from the 9th century and an elaborately adorned copy of the Gutenberg Bible. The oldest handwritten book in the collection is a Coptic codex of the biblical Book of Proverbs dating from the 3rd century; the oldest printed book is an 8th century Buddhist text from Japan, the Hyakumantó Darani.
The library also has an extensive collection of important music manuscripts, including 80% of all the autographs of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the largest collection in the world. Famous examples include Bach's Mass in B Minor, the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, and nearly all of Mozart's operas. In addition to Ludwig van Beethoven's 4th, 5th, and 8th Symphonies, the Library also holds the autograph score, autograph leaves, and historic records of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, which was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2001.
Other notable items are a 1491 Map of Germany by Nikolaus von Kues, the Atlas of The Great Elector (German: Atlas des Großen Kurfürsten), the Jahangir-Album from around 1600, and the largest Hebrew Bible and the largest parchment Torah scroll in the world.
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