New NSK exhibition: “Marginalia, in the focus” on view by 7 Nov 2025

From 24 October to 7 November 2025, the National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) will put on Marginalia, in the focus, an exhibition spotlighting the secrets of inscriptions on the margins of items in the Library’s collections.

Authored by members of the NSK staff art historian and curator Iva Perinić and heritage collections specialist Ivan Volarević, the exhibition was prepared with the support of the Croatian Ministry of Culture and Media and will be held as part of the 2025 Croatian Book Month. It will feature the wealth and diversity of marginalia in various languages and scripts included in a wide variety of the Library’s holdings, ranging from works of the medieval period preserved as part of the Library’s Manuscripts and Rare Books Collection and Map Collection to more recent and contemporary content from the NSK Music Collection and Print Collection.

Marginalia all over the place – from historic books to digital content

Presenting notes, drawings, remarks and comments (ranging from interesting to rather unconventional), as well as elaborate sketches, the exhibition material includes 15^th-17^th-century books, contemporary examples in textbooks, published research and literary works, cartographic resources, sheet music, prints and digital content. 

Some of the works with most valuable examples of marginalia are the 16^th-century transcript of the 1288 Croatian codex constituting the second oldest Slavic legal text and the 1513 edition of Naturalis historia, by Pliny the Elder, the most comprehensive work surviving from the ancient Roman period, including the 20^th-century notes inscribed on the 18^th-century plan for the historic Osijek fortress (Tvrđa) and the city walls.

Representing the most recent examples are the comments that the followers of the NSK pages and profiles on social media left to the Library’s post about its exhibition marking 70 years of Croatia’s iconic teenage magazine, showing how the universal human need for expressing one’s thoughts and emotions, in particular during one’s interaction with cultural artefacts, got new forms with the arrival of the digital age.

Apart from the authors, the exhibition will be presented by the NSK Director General Dr Ivanka Stričević, Professor at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Jelena Lakuš and Dr Tomislav Matić, from the Croatian Institute of History.

Visit the exhibition and discover the wealth behind the silent marks and almost invisible traces by the authors, former owners and explorers of our treasures.