Rare Books from Imperial Russia and Its Predecessor States in the UC Berkeley Library

ABSTRACT The present article discusses the University of California-Berkeley’s collection of select rare books from Imperial Russia and its predecessor states while relating this tracing to the history of printing in Russia. For this case study, a sample of pre-Petrine era and early Imperial Russian books that were published before 1800 was gathered and analyzed for the subject distribution. This article provides some historical background on how this collection evolved over the history of UC Berkeley. The collection was also analyzed based on Old Church Slavonic and Russian along with the places of imprints within the Russian Empire. The purpose of this case study was to document the rare books from pre-Imperial and Imperial Russia while providing the ancillary yet useful information about the Russian Studies collection development at UC Berkeley.