This page features 34 Khmer and Pali (in Khmer script) manuscripts from the Southeast Asian Rare Book Collection. The texts include selections from Theravada canonical works like the Suttapitaka and Abhidhamma, as well as Jataka tales. They also include popular anonymous works on subjects such as karma, and works on proverbs and prayer as well as a Khmer-language version of the Ramayana. Some manuscripts were donated by J. Thomas Rimer, a former Asian Division chief, and were formerly in the personal libraries of French colonial-era scholars Paul Mus and Suzanne Karpelès. Other texts were donated by individuals such as Allen Thrasher, a former librarian in the Asian Division.

This page also lists Khmer rare books from the French colonial-era. These works were created at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh in the 1920s and 1930s. The texts were similarly donated to the Library by Rimer from the libraries of Paul Mus and Suzanne Karpelès, the latter of whom helped establish the Buddhist Institutes in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Vientiane and Luang Prabang, Laos. The texts are important for being some of the earliest printed texts using Western printing, including a Khmer-language text printed in Cambodia in 1927. Also significant is a 1931 volume, of a larger 10-volume set, of the Tripitaka, listed below which is possibly the first printing of the Tripitaka in Khmer script. Texts are authored by notables such as Chhuon Nath, who later became the Supreme Patriarch of the Cambodian Buddhist Sangha.

For ephemera collections, there is also a small USIA Cold War-era Khmer collection.