A new addition to the project on collectors and collections of antiquarian books on political economy warrants the exploration of the University of Heidelberg Library Special Collections. For that purpose, a week’s mission (27 November to 1st Dec. 2023) has been organised.

Emanuel Leser (1849-1914) taught at Heidelberg from 1879. As a young ‘docent’, he had E. R. A. Seligman (Columbia) as a pupil, who recounts that it was Leser who passed on his love of old books

The books and the collection as a whole bear the hallmarks of a working collection. The library contains every work of importance published in English from the 17th century on (Malynes, Mun, Petty, …) to the works of the Classical School (Smith, Ricardo, ….) and those of Leser’s fellow economists throughout Europe and the United States (Cunningham, Marshall, Gide, Pareto, Seligman etc.). But it is the four-hundred volume whole library of tracts that is the most intriguing. This appears to be the library of a gentleman, already bound and labelled, then sold as one item. Unfortunately no archives remain allowing the provenance (stately house or dealer) to be ascertained.

The previous work done on this collection dates back to 1973 (Coing), and considers the collection from a librarian’s point of view. It does not compare it to other similar collections. It is hoped that the previous work done on the Dubois, Wagner, Foxwell and Seligman collections will throw light on the Leser collections’ holdings, and bring a new understanding of the context in which this German library was built up.