Saxon State and University Library Dresden

The awkward compound name is the point of it. The Saxon State and University Library Dresden is two institutions that agreed to become one, and the title was built so that neither tradition disappeared into the other. The state library side traces its collections to the electoral private library begun in 1556 and had been the state library of Saxony since 1917; it was the only one of the state libraries in the German Democratic Republic to keep that function. The university library side served the Technische Universitat Dresden. The two merged in August 1996, and in August 2002 the combined institution opened a new central building on the university campus, which brought the two inventories physically together for the first time.

Between those dates lies the reason the merger mattered. The war left the state library holding about 55,000 volumes and working out of the former house of a singers' society. Everything the library is now was rebuilt from that base. The Deutsche Fotothek, the photographic archive, was later attached to it as a department.

For this atlas the library is a custodian and not a subject. It is here because one book in its manuscript collection is one of the four Maya books that survived the sixteenth century, and because what happened to that book in Dresden is now part of the book's own record rather than a footnote to it.

Johann Christian Goetze, librarian to the Elector of Saxony, bought the codex in Vienna in 1739 from an owner the record does not name, and it entered the royal library at Dresden that year. How it reached Vienna is not documented. The usual supposition is a route through the early shipments sent from Mexico to the Habsburg court, but that is an inference and not a paper trail, and the atlas does not upgrade it into one.

Two later moments matter more than the purchase. In the 1880s Ernst Foerstemann, then the librarian, worked out the Maya bar and dot numerals, the Long Count and the Venus table from the pages in front of him. That is the foundation the whole decipherment of Maya writing was built on, and it was done by a librarian on his own institution's holding rather than in the field.

In February 1945 the library was hit during the Allied bombing of Dresden and the codex was water damaged. The pigments suffered and some pages are harder to read now than they were in the nineteenth century. The consequence is unusual and worth stating plainly: the facsimiles made before the damage are evidence in their own right, not merely convenient reproductions, because for some passages they preserve a reading the original no longer offers. A custodian is normally the last word on what a manuscript says. Here the custodian's own earlier copies have to be read alongside it, and a scholar who consults only the object is working from the poorer witness.