Königsberg State and University Library
It was destroyed in 1944 during World War II in the invasion by the Soviet Union after which the city was occupied and renamed Kaliningrad.
Initially only two of Albert's volumes were bound with plates of embossed silver by silversmiths, but it expanded to twenty after the duke's second marriage in 1550 to Anna Marie of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
[2] Besides the splendid Lutheran Bible by Cornelius Vorwend of Nuremberg, there were also three works by Paul Hoffmann, six by Gerhard Lenz, and five by Hieronymus Kösler, the latter three all being from Königsberg.
[2] It grew in size to require a librarian, the efficient Felix König (Rex) of Ghent, also known as Polyphemus, who instituted systematic and alphabetical catalogs.
[6] Albert made the Castle Library public in 1540, an act celebrated by theologians and humanists and praised by Wilhelm Gnapheus in Latin poetry.
The Castle Library flourished through the leadership of Heinrich Zell (worked 1557–64), who added 1,000 volumes and reorganized it.
It was possibly by a suggestion of Zell that Albert decreed in 1557 that a copy of all books printed in Prussia be included within the Castle Library; legal deposit continued until 1945.
It began to stagnate in 1618 after the inheritance of the Duchy of Prussia by the Margraviate of Brandenburg, however; the Hohenzollern rulers focused on developing the libraries of Berlin instead of Königsberg.
[14] Michael Lilienthal (1686–1750) was a librarian at the start of the 18th century, while during the administration of Martin Sylvester Grabe the Younger (1674–1727) it acquired 800 volumes.
The University Library often received donations, such as the 3,000 volume and coin collection of the mathematician David Bläsing (1660–1719), the substantial collection of Professor Cölestin Kowalewski (lived 1700–71), part of the theologian Georg Christoph Pisanski's estate, and a donation from the Tilsit merchant Johann Daniel Gordack in 1790.
[14] The University Library of that era was detrimentally located in two rooms within Königsberg Castle between the Schlosskirche and a tower.
The University Library received the collection of the Etatsministerium in 1805, as that government ministry had been dissolved the previous year.
Georg Heinrich Ludwig Nicolovius was only librarian from 1807 to 1809, but his effective administration acquired 2,832 volumes, more than Reusch had managed over a much longer time.
In 1858 the bibliophile Friedrich August Gotthold (lived 1839–80), director of the Collegium Fridericianum, donated his personal collection of 36,000 volumes to the library.
Gotthold's collection included belles-lettres, classical philology, pedagogy, history, geography, and music since the Renaissance.
[15] Collections and Nachlässe acquired around the turn of the century included Friedrich Zanders (1811–94), Gustav Hirschfeld (1847–95), Jakob Caro (1835–1904), and August Hagen (1834–1910).
The new institution was built in Mitteltragheim in place of the Baroque Braxein-Tettau Palace once owned by the apothecary and councilor August Wilhelm Hensche.
