Books

The collection of books amounts to more than 4.7 million volumes. It features publications issued since the beginning of the XIX century to the present day on the territory of Belarus and other countries, in more than 80 languages.

The total book collection consists of several parts, the most precious of which is the collection of national documents. It includes periodicals published on the territory of Belarus; works by Belarusian authors published abroad; publications issued in the Belarusian language, regardless of the place of publication; publications with content relating to Belarus, regardless of the language, place and other indications. The collection is based on legal deposit publications received by the library since 1922, as well as publications painstakingly collected by library staff with the goal of forming a more comprehensive retrospective collection and a collection of foreign publications. Publications of the XIX and early XX centuries, including the works of academician E. Karsky, P. Shein and N. Yanchuk on the Belarusian language, literature and ethnography, and the works of A. Sapunov and V. Picheta on the history of Belarus are the most precious. Also, here are the first and lifetime publications of the classics of Belarusian literature, Vincent Dunin-Martsinkevich, F. Bogushevich, J. Kupala, J. Kolas, M. Bogdanovich and others. The collections includes the original Statutes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, descriptions and reviews of Russian provinces, reports of the provincial statistical committees, works on the economy of the region, studies of the Belarusian ethnography and folk art.

Books published in the Russian Federation and other CIS countries are the largest part of the collection. Today it amounts to more than 3 million volumes, including legal deposit publications (free and paid), publications acquired by the library in different times, donated by the libraries of the Russian Federation and individuals. The collection features socially important and demanded publications on various branches of knowledge, published from 1831 to the present.

The collection of books published in other countries amounts to more than 400 000 volumes. It features publication on technology, medicine, history, art, architecture; works of classics of world literature published in various languages, from 1801 to the present day. Books in the Polish language published in the XIX–XX centuries both in Poland and abroad and with content relating to Poland are gathered in a separate section. Another section includes books published abroad in the Serbo-Croatian language.

The book collection also contains cooperatively processed documents. Official, industrial and practical, reference and information, educational and methodological documents, advertising and other publications are aggregated into separate folders according to the content, kind, sometimes genre and publishing facilities.