The Library’s oldest bound manuscript is the so called Codex Koncz, which is a 14th century Latin copy of the Bible. On some of its pages there is a Hungarian inscription containing 55 words, known as the Marginal Notes of Marosvásárhely and it represents the sixth oldest Hungarian linguistic record having been dated to the first quarter of the 15th century.
Out of the 72 incunabula (books printed before 1500) the oldest one was printed in Bologna c. 1475, its author is Galeotto Marzio, member of King Mathias’ court and also the latter’s physician.
Just a few years ago the oldest Transylvanian print was discovered among fragments kept at our Library: this one-leaf print contains a perpetual calendar and prayers, it was printed in 1525 in Sibiu.
Among the one and a half thousand old Hungarian prints (before 1711) a unique (the only remaining copy) book is Magyar logikátska by János Csere de Apácza, which is the first ever Hungarian textbook on logic (Alba-Iulia, 1654). Another unique (incomplete) book is Bálint Balassi’s volume of poems in Hungarian, published around 1660 in Bardejov.
A rare volume is also represented by a Calvinist Catechism in Romanian, published in Alba-Iulia in 1648.
Our Library also houses a rich and varied collection of Bibles: products of famous European printing houses in Hebrew, Latin, Greek; polyglots and different vernacular Bibles (English, French, German, Dutch, Polish etc.) as well as the first Hungarian and Romanian Bible translations.
The bindings of the books have also been carried out by famous masters; most of the styles from Gothic to Art Nouveaux are present on the shelves of our Library.
