As of January 2022, Hyundam Collection contains a total of 89,150 items.
The collection of premodern Korean textual materials consists primarily of Chosŏn Dynasty texts composed in literary Chinese.
These include 56 texts that are considered especially rare, as well as a total of thirty-three registered cultural assets: three texts
registered as South Korean “national treasures” and twenty-eight registered as South Korean “treasures,” as well as two registered
as “cultural assets” in Seoul. Epistolary documents, deeds of (land) sale, family registers, instructional primers, and government
documents from before Korea’s modern period contained in Hyundam collection are an invaluable window on every-day
life and the socio-economic history of premodern Korea. In addition, facsimiles suggesting East Asian traditional culture more
broadly cannot be overlooked.
Hyundam Mun’go also contains a rich collection of materials published between Korea’s enlightenment period and the 1960s— including
rare monographs, newspapers and journals, as well as scrap books of various kinds—that reveals Korea’s intellectual and cultural
inheritance from the end of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Korean War (1950). Hyundam Mun’go’s collection of journals
from this period is considered among the best in South Korea in terms of both the quantity and the quality of the gathered materials.
Hyundam Mun’go also houses memorabilia donated by some of Korea’s most renown literary artists. These include manuscripts, letters,
stationary, in addition to books and journals, contributed by Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi, O Yŏng-su, and Paek Ch’ŏl. As literary
testimonies to their age, these materials suggest the haunted creative worlds and distinctive lived experiences of these authors.
