German library pays £2.5m for 'friendship book', 400 years after it first tried to buy it

Philipp Hainhofer’s Das Großes Stammbuch, signed by influential 17th-century Europeans, acquired by Herzog August Bibliothek

Almost 400 years after Augustus the Younger tried and failed to buy the “extraordinary” Das Großes Stammbuch – a “friendship book” signed by some of the most powerful figures of 17th-century Europe – for the library he was building in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, it has finally landed on his shelves.

Duke Augustus, a German member of the House of Welf who died in 1666 aged 87, was instrumental in collecting some of the hundreds of thousands of books that form the Herzog August Bibliothek, one of the world’s oldest libraries, which is named after him.

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