Kunstbibliothek Berlin

The Kunstbibliothek at the Kulturforum is a specialist research library founded in 1867 within the Berlin State Museums, holding around 400,000 volumes on art history, architecture, design and fashion. It functions as both research institution and exhibiting museum: collections include the Poster Cabinet with some 150,000 posters from Toulouse-Lautrec to John Heartfield, an important fashion-print collection spanning the 17th to 19th centuries, and the architecture archive with original drawings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The advertising collection documents German consumer history from the Kaiserreich to the present. Visitors can use the airy main reading room and view rotating thematic exhibitions that surface curiosities from the stacks, from Biedermeier fashion journals to GDR commercial graphics.