8. Book of hours on parchment. 15. century

Count Otto Thott is the greatest Danish book collector. At his death in 1785 his library consisted of more than 140,000 volumes. Books and manuscripts were set out and made available to researchers and students in a special library building which the count had arranged to be constructed in the garden behind his mansion in the King's Square, today the French embassy.

Thott's 4,000 manuscripts and 6,000 incunabula and post-incunabula (prints until and including 1530) were willed as a gift to The Royal Library whose Manuscript Department was thereby more than doubled at a stroke. Among Otto Thott's great variety of collection items were French and Dutch illuminated prayer books in small formats.

Many of these examples of late-medieval superb book-craft are often on loan to exhibitions round about the world. One of them, a Low German book of hours (Horae) on parchment, with a beautiful, illuminated sheet and gilded initials throughout, has clearly been restored after being incorporated in The Royal Library, but the cover has now come completely away from the body of the manuscript and cannot therefore be exhibited.