Library of the Paul Wolfgang Merkel Family Foundation
The library of the Paul Wolfgang Merkelschen Family Foundation is a valuable private library on the subject of Nuremberg (Norica collection) that goes back to the book holdings of the Welser von Neunhof and is on deposit in the library of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg. The family foundation is the museum's largest private lender.
The library has 1214 manuscripts and around 5800 pamphlets.
The library was founded by the Nuremberg patrician Paul Carl Welser von Neunhof (1722–1788). Welser came from the Nuremberg line of the well-known Augsburg trading family and held numerous offices. In a time of crisis and economic decline, the antiquarian collection of evidence from Nuremberg's "golden age" in the 15th and 16th centuries, even if it is mainly copies from the 17th and 18th centuries, was a remarkable piece of patrician evidence Assertion. His son Hans Karl Welser (1758–1800) kept the Norica library, while the other books in his father's library were sold. After Johann Wolfgang von Goethe refused to buy the library for the Weimar library in 1804, a buyer was found in the Nuremberg merchant Paul Wolfgang Merkel (1756–1820) in 1805. After his death, the heirs held Merkel's collection together until the family council decided on June 30, 1838 to keep the Welser library and Merkel's art collection as inalienable family property. In 1858 the family foundation was confirmed. A special regulation decided in 1857 that when Wenzel Jamnitzer's centerpiece was sold, the Welsersche library should be transferred to the Nuremberg City Library, was forgotten when the Jamnitzer factory (now in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam ) was sold in 1880. In 1875 the collections were given to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum as a deposit.
The manuscript collection was analyzed in more detail by Dominik Radlmaier in his dissertation in 2008: Of the 1214 volumes, administrative documents dominate with 37.5%, followed by historiography (28.1%), Juridica (11.8%) and genealogy with 8 , 3%.
literature
- Dominik Radlmaier: Manuscripts of the Welser. The library of the Paul Wolfgang Merkelschen Family Foundation in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (Nürnberger Werkstücke zur Stadt- und Landesgeschichte 66), Nürnberg: Stadtarchiv Nürnberg 2008 ISBN 9783877077207 Review