Franciscan monastery Graz

The central library of the Franciscan monastery in Graz currently contains over 13,000 volumes dated before 1700 alone, plus 440 manuscripts and 818 incunabula as well as 35,000 after 1700, which means that there are almost 50,000 individual works in total.

The oldest are individual parchment manuscripts from the 9th–13th centuries, which have only survived as fragments, as they were glued onto the wooden book covers to cover them and now exist as waste paper due to careful removal. Among them are parchment leaves of a Vulgate copy (around 900) from Wolfram's Parzival and Willehalm poems as well as a Christherre Chronicle (around 1300).

Among the valuable incunabula and early prints, 70% are theological works (mostly in Latin; but also the first German-language Bibles before Martin Luther, around 1470), often with artistic illustrations. However, there are also numerous scientific, medical, philosophical, legal and historical works as well as various 16th century dictionaries and historical atlases.