Printed Books Collections
The Vatican Library possesses 1,600,000 printed books, predominantly old and rare books, including over 8,600 incunabula; tens of thousands of sixteenth-century editions (which are included in EDIT16, the ICCU's census of Italian sixteenth-century books) and even more seventeenth-century ones (particularly in the Barberini and Chigi collections), as well as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books. The Library preserves two types of collections of printed books: “closed collections” and “open collections”.