Catalogue of the Telč College Library

The Library had been an integral part of the local Jesuit order house since its foundation. Among the oldest items acquired by the Telč Library, we also find donations by the founder of the College (ID: NŘ, III 536/3). The scope and structure of the collection were probably more or less in line with typical contents of Jesuit libraries. However, several well-preserved manuscript catalogues still need to be examined to provide a definitive answer. They cover both the heyday of the College and the situation following its dissolution in 1773. In Telč, just as elsewhere, this resulted in the dispersal of the library books and, probably, the loss of its furnishings.

The books were distributed among various places and are now to be found within different large historical collections in the Czech Republic. The largest set of these books is owned by the Premonstratensian canonry in Nová Říše. The basic theological literature coming from Telč was a valuable contribution to the Nová Říše collection. The canonry purchased about 600 volumes of uniformly bound books that allow us to reconstruct, at least to some extent, the contents of the Telč Library. According to Vladislav Dokoupil’s Dějiny moravských klášterních knihoven [The History of Moravian Monastery Libraries], at least five Nová Říše incunabula and some manuscripts also come from Telč.

About half of the Telč books at Nová Říše were catalogued in 2017 under the current project. A record of these can be found here. The cataloguing will continue in 2018 and will also cover the collection of the Telč Castle Library, to which many books from the Jesuit College would probably also have been transferred. The surviving catalogues will also be analysed. The objective of the entire research activity is to virtually connect the existing volumes to the records in the historical catalogues and other documents, thus allowing, among other things, a well-founded analysis of the contents of the Telč Library.