Institute for Postal History Studies's library - ISSP of Prato

The term "postal history" has a double meaning: on the one hand indicates the investigation of the phenomena of organized communication with a new fruitful way of approach that links together different disciplines such as social history and the culture, the epistolography, history and business administration, palaeography, the diplomacy, economic history, historical geography, history of journalism and trade, and on the other hand, in the world of philately, the term refers to a type of advanced and refined collecting.

The library was founded in 1982 with the Institute and reflects precisely this meaning: it includes itinerary guides and ancient postcards and historic-postal monographs and recent volumes of Italian and foreign postal stamps. It was founded around a private core and has also works on military history published by the various historical offices an series such as “I documenti diplomatici italiani" and "L'Italia in Africa" published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Along with the library there is also a newspaper library, that is specialized too and that counts 1077 Italian and foreign, current and ceased magazines, albeit often incomplete collections. Beside the library and the newspaper library is an important archive of postal history documents (about 300/400.000 documents) and there is the project to make a inventory of them.