The museum was founded in 1972 in the International Year of the book celebrated by UNESCO. It is located in the National Kyiv-Pechersk Historical and Cultural Reserve in a former printing house of Laura, which continuously operated for over 300 years (beginning of the XVII century - twentieth years of XX century.).
The museum contains a rich treasure of literary culture of the Ukrainian people. The exposition covers the history of domestic books and of books from the time of Kievan Rus to the present day. The exhibits tell about the creation of written language among the Eastern Slavs, hand-written book about X-XVI centuries, on the origin of printing in Europe, the beginning and the development of Cyrillic typography, publishing Ivan Fedorov, other prominent founders of Ukrainian books XVI-XVIII centuries, Kyiv-Pechersk, Lviv, Ostrog, Pochayev, Chernihiv printing houses.
There are presented the publications of XIX-XX centuries from different areas of knowledge, as well as periodicals, book illustrations, documents and bibliographic materials, samples printing machinery, paper, fonts and so on.
In the museum one can familiarize with a unique art decoration of the books by many talented artists past and present, to inspect the books, decorated minting of gold and silver, in frames of leather, velvet ornaments. It is shown the development of the historical forms of the book, its architectonics. There are exhibited the editions marked by high awards of international and national exhibitions of art books, miniature books, publishing brand, documents samizdat edition of the Ukrainian diaspora in many countries around the world.
Who would not be interesting to see the ancient manuscripts, early printed books, equipment on which they were made, and look at the old-old newspapers and books, which our great-great-grandmother studied on?
It is worth paying attention to: facsimiles Ostromir, Reims (exported to France by Anna Yaroslavna, where French kings swore) and Peresopnytsia Gospels, old editons of XVII century, the first edition of "The Aeneid" Kotlyarevsky, miniature books (3x4 mm) "Miracle of Miracles ".