Support the Library

Companies or private citizens can become partners of the Mazarine Library, helping to enrich, preserve and transmit its invaluable cultural heritage.

The Mazarine Library is France's oldest public library. It began with a donation by Mazarin in 1661.

It is entitled to receive gifts, donations and bequests, which may support:

• A research programme,
• A restoration project,
• A digitisation operation,
• Publication of an exhibition catalogue,
• Purchase of a manuscript, set of archives, artworks or rare books.

A tax receipt is issued for gifts, donations and bequests, which entitles the donor to an income or corporate tax rebate, under current legislation on sponsorship and patronage.

The Mazarine Library is happy to give donors the type of visibility they wish for (name printed in a publication, provenance statement in a notice about a rare and precious document, logo, etc...).

Some recent patronage operations:

2016

• Acquisition, with the support of the B.H. Breslauer fundation, of historical records of the Society Firmin-Didot, from XVIII_^th to XX_^th centuries (on-going inventory).
• Acquisition, with the support of the Hennessy society, of a collection of Molière's plays (1664), within two original editions.

2014

• Organisation of the exhibition La Tour de Nesle : De pierre, d'encre et de fiction, with the support of the Société Hennessy, from 12 september to 12 december 2014. Catalogue Bibliothèque Mazarine / Editions des Cendres, 2014, 236 p.

2013

• Acquisition, with the support of Global Bio-Energies, of a copy of a seminal text for the history of the Antilles, annotated by the author: Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire generale des isles de S. Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique, et autres dans l'Amérique, Paris, 1654. The library already owned the manuscript of the text, perhaps in the author's hand. Bought in 2013, this copy of the first edition, previously unknown, was probably used to prepare the second edition, corrected, amended and augmented, which Du Tertre published in 1667.
• Acquisition of two theses with engravings defended at the Collège Mazarin in the eighteenth century, with the help of the Société des amis de Versailles.

2012

• Organisation of the exhibition The Armenian Book from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: a Culture in Diaspora, with the patronage of the Gulbenkian Foundation and Fineco, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the invention of Armenian printing. Catalogue directed by Mikaël Nichanian and Yann Sordet, Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine / Éditions des Cendres, 2012, 189 p.

2012-2013

• Individual donations went towards the publication of exhibition catalogues.

2008

• Acquisition of a copy of Ariosto's Orlando furioso (Venice, 1560), from the library of the painter Daniel Dumonstier (1574-1646), containing a manuscript list of French, Italian and Spanish novels owned by the artist. Supported by the B.H. Breslauer foundation.

2000

• Indexing of illuminations on mediaeval manuscripts as part of the Liber floridus project, thanks to the patronage of the La Poste Foundation.