"The Morgan collection of printed books is hard to characterize because of its diversity. It contains monuments of typography and illustration from all periods, often in particularly fine copies.
More than in most rare book collections, volumes have been scrutinized for admission to the Morgan Library on the basis of their individual rather than contextual importance.
The books chosen are a minute sample of the extensive flow of material which came forth in the early decades of printing. They spread over about thirty years. They include writings in English, French, German, Low German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Latin and (partially) Greek. The books were printed in nineteen widely scattered cities by thirty-six different presses (including one printer working in two different cities). The genres and categories of the texts are equally wide-ranging. There are classical authors, grammars, devotional and mystical texts, service books, Bibles and a pseudo-Gospel, hagiography, music printing, fable literature, homiletics, juristics, history and fictionalized history, satire, poetry, romances, a travel book of sorts, an herbal, a book of table manners."