The Van Manen collection is a collection held in the Leiden University Library which contains a large number of Tibetan and Himalayan texts. These started arriving in Leiden in the 1920s and 1930s, when the texts were sent from India, along with Sanskrit and other Indic materials, by Johan Van Manen (1877-1943). Van Manen also collected artefacts and these are housed in the Worldmuseum in Leiden.
The Van Manen collection as a whole consists of nearly 1000 blockprints, over 600 manuscripts, around 450 artworks and objects of use. It also contain mostly uncatalogued notebooks, pictures, maps, letters, drafts of articles, drawings, scraps of paper, a personal archive and a variety of ephemera. This ERC-funded project aims to organize and bring together all these different aspects of the collection, facilitating of the study the collecting activity of Van Manen as a integrated process.
Our team will frequently publish blogs on our most recent discoveries on this site.
