UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

The Erkes Collection: approx. 4500 titles form the basis comprising literature from the 16th century to around 1930.

The Löffler Collection: Heinrich Erkes' son-in-law, Otto Löffler, donated an annual amount to the UCL between 1975 and 1990 to continue the Icelandic collection. Thus the library received an increase of 1400 titles.

The Library of the German-Icelandic Society Cologne: In 1998, 67 titles, 5 special editions, some journal volumes and individual issues could be taken over from the dissolved library. Most of the holdings were transferred to the library of the Institute of Scandinavian Studies.

New acquisition of the UCL: Since the 1930s, the Islandica Collection has been continued with funds from the UCL. An annual amount is made available for the current new publications. Since the year of acquisition 2006, newly acquired titles with their own shelfmark ISL have been placed in  according to Numerus Currens.

The Erkes Collection:

The heart of the important Iceland collection in the UCL is undoubtedly the donation of about 4500 titles by Heinrich Erkes in 1920.

Heinrich Erkes was born in Elberfeld in 1864 and grew up in Cologne. After studying Modern Languages and Geology in Bonn for a few years, he joined his parents' trading company as a merchant and finally managed it on his own from 1900. Erkes became very involved in politics early on. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1890, became a city councillor in Cologne in 1917, and from 1921 to 1924 he became a member of the Prussian state parliament in Berlin.
In addition to his business and political activities, Heinrich Erkes had had a great interest in Iceland since his school days. He learned the language, travelled frequently to Iceland, documented it with photographs and published detailed reports on his travels. Soon he was regarded as an excellent connoisseur of Iceland. The first German dictionary for New Icelandic was written by Heinrich Erkes. He published it in 1906 after his first trip to Iceland.

The Association for Geography in Dresden appointed Erkes as a corresponding member and invited him to participate in the founding of the Association of Friends of Iceland. Erkes became second secretary of the association founded in March 1913 and remained associated with it in various functions until his death in 1932, including as managing director. He regularly published articles and dissertations in the "Mitteilungen der Islandfreunde". He was awarded the Order of the Falcons by the Icelandic government in 1924 for his services to Iceland.

Throughout the years Erkes collected books, newspapers, magazines and maps from and about Iceland very systematically with a true passion, providing  a unique collection of several thousand Icelandic titles for a private individual.

Since Heinrich Erkes was unable to continue his trading business after the First World War, he changed his profession: after negotiations with the city of Cologne, in which Konrad Adenauer was also involved as Lord Mayor at the time, he succeeded in 1920 in getting a position as an academic librarian at the newly founded University of Cologne.

His admission ticket was the transfer of his extensive collection of Icelandic literature to the university library. He continued to look after this collection himself. One year before his death in 1931, Olaf Klose edited the Icelandic catalogue of the University Library of Kiel and the University Library of Cologne.

In contrast to the old collection of the Kiel Icelandic Collection, which lost a third of its value as a result of the war, the Erkes Collection in Cologne remained undamaged.

The 232 titles that were printed before 1800 should be highlighted from the collection, since it's the reason for the collections' uniqueness. It includes a print of the first Icelandic Bible from the year 1584, the "Jónsbok" of the Icelandic printer Jón Jónsson from 1578, about 30 catechisms in Icelandic language, the first complete edition of the Sæmundar-Edda (1787-1828), 54 further editions of the "Edda" and additionally 22 editions of the so-called "Prosa-Edda" of Snorri Sturlusson.
Also from later time almost all important titles are available. Another focus of the collection is on Icelandic newspapers and magazines.

In order to document the collection in its fullness and to make the individual titles findable, Erkes created both a card catalogue of his collection and an alphabetical handwritten catalogue of which the original is in the National Library in Reykjavik and a copy in the UCL.

This catalogue has been digitised and is now available to everyone for direct consultation.

The Association of Friends of Iceland disbanded in early 1937 to avoid capture by the National Socialists.

As successors the Society of Friends of Iceland e.V. was founded in Hamburg in 1950 and the German-Icelandic Society e.V. was founded in Cologne in 1955. (DIG).
The decisive factor for Cologne as the headquarters of the DIG was that the UCL houses the Icelandic collection of the founding member of the predecessor society Heinrich Erkes.

Erkes, Heinrich: Catalogue of the Icelandcollection (in German): Digital copy of Heinrich Erkes' handwritten catalogue on his collection of Icelandic books and journals.

Newspaper excerpt collection of Erkes (in German): Collected newspaper articles by Heinrich Erkes about several aspects of Iceland.

 Stefan Ertz has written a bibliography of all essays and writings written by Heinrich Erkes (in German): erkesbibliographie.pdf (pdf, 184KB)

The Löffler Collection:

Dr. Otto Löffler donated an annual amount to the UCL between 1975 and 1990 to continue the Icelandic collection. In this way the library received an increase of 1400 titles.
A further 4000 titles have been purchased from the UCL budget since the 1930s in order to continuously expand the unique stock of Islandica.
In the year 1998 67 titles, 5 special editions and some journal volumes and special prints could be taken over from the dissolved library of the German-Icelandic Society Cologne.

Beginning with the acquisition year 2006, recently acquired titles with their own group shelf mark will be placed according to Numerus Currens. All dust jackets worth preserving are stored. A separate budget is made available for the expansion of the collection.

Erkes, Heinrich: Katalog der Islandsammlung Digitalisat des handschriftlich, verfassten Kataloges von Heinrich Erkes zu seiner Sammlung Isländischer Bücher und Zeitschriften.
Zeitungsausschnittssammlung Erkes Gesammelte Zeitungsartikel von Heinrich Erkes über alle möglichen Aspekte Islands.

Verzeichnis der Schriften von Heinrich Erkes / zusammengestellt von Dr. Stefan Ertz (PDF-Dokument: 185 KB) Stefan Ertz verfasste eine Bibliographie aller von Heinrich Erkes verfassten Aufsätze und Schriften.
Islandkatalog der Universitätsbibliothek Kiel und der Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln
Briefe von Sigríður Zoëga von 1910-14

The University and City Library is looking for sponsors of books from the collection of Heinrich Erkes. Do you want to become a book patron?

The interest in literature from and about Iceland increased strongly in recent years. In order to make the interesting stock of Icelandic literature in the UCL more accessible and to present it uniformly, a project was set up in 2006.
It focuses on the following topics:

Retrospective content development of the Icelandic collection of the UCL:

When the Erkes Collection came after the transfer to the newly founded University and City Library of Cologne in 1920, it was not set up as a complete collection, but was inserted into the existing general systematic magazine list, which was maintained until 1963. The new Icelandic titles were also incorporated into the later rough group-accessory list and the list according to Numerus Currens that replaced it, without any special labelling.

Due to this historical genesis of the collection, the valuable Icelandic holdings cannot yet be presented as a whole in the UCL. Neither the formal nor the content-related indexing nor the accession of the Icelandic titles to the collection has uniform processing features which could be used to present the Icelandic titles as a content-related or formal unit. With existing conventional tools such as printed catalogues, card catalogues and accession journals, only segments can be searched for relevant criteria. In the same way, the electronic library systems (inventory, cataloguing) can only be used to search specific areas.

In order to provide students, teachers, scientists and researchers, as well as all other users, with easy and direct access to the Icelandic collection, the project Islandica Collection was established in July 2007.

The following objectives are pursued with retrospective content indexing:

• a uniform systematic and verbal content indexing of the entire collection.
• the possibility of searching and finding literature in the entire collection in terms of content and subject matter.
• the content indexing is carried out with the following scientific indexing instruments: the allocation of keywords according to the rules of the allocation of keywords to the scientific library and the allocation of relevant notations of the basic classification.
• in addition to a pure keyword search, one third of the titles can now be searched with notations of the basic classification and standardized keywords of the keyword norm file.

Revision of all title entries:

All title records of the Islandica Collection are checked, wrong spelling, missing persons, e.g. illustrators, translators, editors etc. are corrected or supplemented. Missing country and language codes, extent and / or illustration details are also added. The numerous necessary corrections to author names are particularly noteworthy.

In the future: presentation of the collection in its own specialist portal

A separate specialist portal will allow separate access to the regional catalogue Islandica as a partial catalogue of the entire stock. In addition to the formal and content search options mentioned above, there will be further options:

• a systematic introduction (also in English version)
• an alphabetical list of authors of belle-lettres literatur
• further entry opportunities: Maps, travel literature, children's literature

The project is carried out in close cooperation with the Institute for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Cologne and the German-Icelandic Society Cologne.

In 2011, the project was supported by a donation from Dr. Henner Löffler, allowing a scientific assistant to be hired for the cataloguing of the older holdings. Dr. Löffler is the grandson of Heinrich Erkes.

• eine einheitliche systematische und verbale inhaltliche Erschließung der gesamten Sammlung.
• die Möglichkeit im gesamten Bestand der Sammlung inhaltlich und thematisch Literatur zu suchen und zu finden.
• die inhaltliche Erschließung erfolgt mit folgenden wissenschaftlichen Erschließungsinstrumenten: die Schlagwortvergabe nach den Regeln der Schlagwortvergabe an wissenschaftlichen Bibliothek und Vergabe von einschlägigen Notationen der Basisklassifikation.
• über eine reine Stichwortsuche hinaus können inzwischen ein Drittel der Titel mit Notationen der Basisklassifikation und normierten Schlagworten der Schlagwortnormdatei recherchiert werden.

18.11.2016: Visit of the Icelandic Ambassador Martin Eyjolfsson

29.11.2014: Visit of the "Society of Friends of Iceland" from Hamburg

26.11.2014: "Whispered into the Wind", reading with the Icelandic author Guðmundur Andri Thorsson on 26 November 2014

23.10.2012: "Windzeit, Wolfszeit" by Karl-Ludwig Wetzig, reading on 23 October 2012

18.11.2011: Visit by Halldór Guðmundsson and Kristín Steinsdóttir

17.10.2011: Supermarket poems from dreamland, reading with the Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason

12.11.2010: Visit of the Icelandic ambassador Gunnar Snorri Gunnarsson

04.12.2002: Visit of the Icelandic President Dr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson

• Philipp Schöbi: Jón „Nonni“ Svenssons Jahre in Feldkirch. Zum 75. Todestag des großen Erzählers, in: MONTFORT Zeitschrift für Geschichte Vorarlbergs BAND 1 / 2020
   
• Philipp Schöbi: Schöne Gefühle der Jugend. Zum 75. Todestag von Jón „Nonni“ Sveinsson SJ, Stimmen der Zeit 144 (2019), Heft 10, Oktober 2019, S. 737-748.
   
• Jón Svensson (1857-1944), In: Philipp Schöbi: Das literarische Feldkirch. Die Montfortstadt als Schauplatz der Literatur. Bucher Verlag Hohenems 2018. S. 32-35.
   
• Regina Jucknies: Heinrich Erkes (1864-1932) (PDF-Dokument: 801 KB) Kölner Kaufmann, Kenner Islands und kluger Bibliothekar. Ein Gedenkvortrag, gehalten in der Universiäts- und Stadtbibliothkek Köln am 13.12.2007. Der Vortrag ist in der Zeitschrift Island, 15. Jahrgang, Heft 2 November 2009 veröffentlich worden. Als Sonderdruck ist er in der Schriftenreihe: Vorträge in der Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln über den Buchhandel oder direkt über die USB zu erwerben.
   
• Gernot Gabel: Heinrich Erkes In: Kölner Sammler und ihre Bücherkollektionen, hrsg. von Gernot Gabel und Wolfgang Schmitz, Köln 2003, Signature: KMB/!YG KÖLN 31 2003