The Southeast Asian Rare Book collection at the Asian Division of the Library of Congress contains over 1,850 unique items. These include more than 300 Theravada Buddhist manuscripts from mainland Southeast Asia, over 500 lontar palm-leaf manuscripts from Bali, Malay and Bugis manuscripts and early printed books, colonial materials, World War II records, Cold War documents, and Christian missionary works in many of the region's languages, representing the expansion of printing to many societies of the region.

The Balinese lontar donated by Bud and Gretchen Velde constitute the largest group of items in the Southeast Asian Rare Book collection. Many of the texts come from Singaraja district in Bali, and cover topics ranging from black magic to traditional recipes, literature and astrology. Some of the texts are beautifully illustrated such as a Balinese version of a story akin to One Thousand and One Nights. There are also many ornate wooden boxes to hold the manuscripts, attesting to the ceremonial value of these texts.

Another significant part of the Rare Book collection is made up of Theravada Buddhist manuscripts. Some manuscripts were donated by J. Thomas Rimer, chief of the Asian Division, 1983-1986. The subjects addressed in these manuscripts are as varied as the cultures and societies which made them. These include poetry, folk tales, great works of literature, and anything in between. Given that many of the manuscript traditions were the work of the Sangha, the Buddhist Monkhood, it is no surprise that many manuscripts are Buddhist religious texts dealing with a range of topics: enlightenment, ordination, chants, Jataka (i.e. former lives of the Buddha) stories, Buddhist hell, religious donations and merit-making, the Pali canon, yantra and mantra protection formulas, and cremation and funerary practices. More esoteric knowledge is also a part of the collection including astrology, horoscopes, the zodiac and medical treatises which are astrological in nature. The manuscripts mostly take the form of either palm leaf manuscripts or accordion-style folding manuscripts on khǭi paper. They are also written in more transitionary and modern forms such as machine-printed palm leaf manuscripts or printed books written in the esoteric scripts of the manuscripts like Tham.

In addition to the lontar and Theravada Buddhist manuscripts, the Southeast Asian Rare Book collection is also home to a small but significant collection of Malay and Bugis manuscripts and early printed books. Many of these manuscripts and books were purchased by Alfred North (1807-1869), an American missionary stationed in Singapore, for the Wilkes Expedition (1838-1842) and were amongst the first Asian works at the Library of Congress. Part of this collection, the Farquhar Correspondence, was recently digitized and a research guide is available.

Christian missionary works are another notable part of the Southeast Asian Rare Book Collection. Bibles and catechisms in various Southeast Asian languages—Malay, Javanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Shan, Mon, Karen and Dayak—provide an opportunity to examine early missionary efforts at translation as well as spreading Christianity. The oldest item of this kind at the Asian Division is a 1677 translation of the Gospels in Romanized Malay. Christian missionary works speak to the spread of Western printing in Southeast Asia. An example of such a work is a fictional travelogue published in 1892 by the American Presbyterian Mission Press entitled Letters from Silom, one of the earliest Western-style printed books in Northern Thailand and Laos.

Beyond the Asian Division, there are rare documents from Southeast Asia held by the Manuscripts Division. There are also many rare books connected to Southeast Asia held by the Rare Books & Special Collections Division. These include some of the oldest works in Southeast Asian languages at the Library. The earliest printed text from Southeast Asia held by the Library of Congress is the Doctrina Christiana. For more information on this important work please see the following blog post and annotated guide to Southeast Asian materials written in Latin held by the Library.