Esperanto Museum

Hugo Steiner created the Austrian National Library’s Esperanto Museum in 1927 as a non-profit organization, and it opened in 1928 in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

Over 80 years of continuous collection has resulted in the world’s largest specialty library for around 500 planned languages.

The Austrian National Library’s Esperanto Museum has an exhibition area of 80 m2 and is regarded the most important of its kind in the world.Multimedia presentations tell the story of Esperanto, which has been around for over a century.Other intended languages, such as Hildegard von Bingen’s mystical Lingua ignota or Klingon from the television series Star Trek, can also be accessed via radio stations.

The collection is home to numerous significant bequests and bequests, including those of Eugen Wüster, the creator of international terminology work, and the Catalan-Portuguese writer Manuel de Seabra.The Esperanto World Federation archive was given to the museum in 2022.

The Austrian National Library’s planned language collection is also the world’s largest specialist library for interlinguistics, with 35,000 volumes, 3,700 journal titles, 3,500 museum objects, 10,000 autographs and manuscripts, 22,000 photos and photo negatives, 1,500 posters, and 40,000 pamphlets documenting around 500 different planned languages, including Volapük, Ido, Interlingua, and Esperanto.

A considerable portion of the library will be made available online as part of a large-scale, multi-year digitalization initiative.The first tranche was scanned in 2007.The papers are available on the website (see “Scanned books online”).So far, the Bildarchiv Austria has made almost 13,000 photographs available online.

The Hofburg was formerly the home of the Esperanto Museum.The relocation to the historic Palais Mollard-Clary in Herrengasse 9 in central Vienna took place in 2005.