Card catalog records for individual titles of works acquired by the Library as part of its Russian Imperial Collection have been created and collected within card record drawer number 188, found in the Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections Division. Representing the most comprehensive list available for the contents of the Library’s Russian Imperial Collection (the individual titles that comprise the Collection did not appear in the original purchase orders for this material), this card record drawer, henceforth referred to here as “drawer 188,” was closely consulted in compiling this bibliography.

However, the card catalog records held within “drawer 188” have proven to contain discrepancies and inaccuracies, as searches for each title in the Library’s collections have verified. A few titles represented in these card records have not been found at all; conversely, other titles exist in the Music Division’s collections for Russian Imperial Collection material which are not otherwise represented in these card records—likely the result of a simple clerical error at the time that this material was acquired and/or their corresponding card records created. The absence of certain titles within “drawer 188” or on the shelves of the Library’s Music and/or Rare Books and Special Collections Divisions is, in any case, indicated within the appropriate entries in this bibliography.

Identifying the Russian Imperial Collection material held within the Music Division’s collections also required reliance on the Music Division’s own card catalogs (at the time of this writing, these catalogs are still in daily use in the Division’s public Performing Arts Reading Room), which provided unique information that allowed the identification of additional titles from the Collection which may have otherwise escaped detection. Finally, despite twenty years of experience working with the Division’s Russian collections, a few titles were even identified by sheer coincidence, both on my part and on that of eagle-eyed colleagues—proving that librarianship is often a humbling and gloriously inexact profession.