[6] The collection includes 8,000 volumes of published books and 870 notebooks made and used by Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails between 1975 and 1995.

[5] A large segment of the material is from the Nablus Jail, the veritable fount of the Palestinian prisoner self-education movement.

Nablus Jail was unique in that it included a small library for detainees, carried over from its time under Jordanian administration.

A 1972 visit by the Red Cross concluded with the vast expansion of the library to include poetry, religious texts, books on Zionism, Marxism, Leninism, and economic theory, among others.

Using this expanded library, detainees created a thriving intellectual culture within Nablus Jail; this self-education movement spread to other Israeli-operated detention facilities as well.