In the mid-1920s, the International Bureau of Education of the historical League of Nations in Geneva began compiling the first comprehensive collection of international children’s and young adult literature in the world. The Geneva Collection includes close to 30,000 books from 58 countries, mainly story-telling literature and picture books. It mainly includes new editions from the 1910s to 1960s, though it also has older prints, beginning with the publication year 1835.
Since children and youth literature in many countries of the League of Nations was at that time not yet considered an object suitable for scholarly study, it was also not considered worth preserving by the national libraries of the period. Thus, there are many editions found in the Geneva Collection that are not present in the public collections of their respective countries of origin, as for example Brazil or Greece.
The Geneva Catalogue can be accessed on the webOPAC online catalogue under the heading G/X*.