Rabindranath Tagore Collection

The Rabindranath Tagore library of José Paz is one of the most important private collections on Tagore in the world. This donation of José Paz contains more than ten thousand volumes in languages from around the world, with numerous first editions in Bengali, as well as in the main European languages. The collection includes a copy of the first 1912 English edition of Gitanjali, the most important work of Tagore, for which he became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among the volumes The Golden Book of Tagore also deserves special mention. It was published with the collaboration of his friends from around the world to commemorate his 70^th anniversary, and only 500 copies were published in 1931. The collection also has books and studies on the author, works dedicated to the three educational institutions he founded to the north of Calcutta: the school of Santiniketan, the rural reconstruction centre Sriniketan and the international Visva-Bharati University, newspaper periodicals directed and founded by Tagore, more than 2,000 CDs of music, videos, documentaries, pictures, prints, photographs and postage stamps. This collection will form the "Rabindranath Tagore Research and Studies Center", whose main purpose will be to conserve, study and disseminate the work of the Bengali genius.