The collection of autographs has grown out of the collection of about 2000 letters of the Cologne banker's daughter and wife Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen (1797-1857), who was associated with Bonn and who for decades moved in the Biedermeier Rhenish and Roman literary and art-loving world. 1849 bequeathed to the Bonn University Library by will, the collection has belonged to the collection since 1859. The original collection also contained foreign correspondence, e.g. letters from the estate of Sibylle's Weimar friend Adele Schopenhauer, whose adopted home was the Rhineland and who died in Bonn in 1849; the collection's holdings were almost doubled in 1895/96 due to the estate of the Bonn bookseller Gustav Marcus (1897 figures: 3928 copies of 2509 persons, 310 portraits).;The foundation of the Geh. Kommerzienrat Emil vom Rath, established in 1910, expressly served the care of Rhenish literature. Not only could manuscripts be acquired from their funds in 1911, but the former Mertens-Schaaffhausen autograph collection could also be expanded into a Rhenish autograph and portrait collection. The collection also grew considerably (by at least 841 pieces) in the years 1919 - 1922, when 184 "well-known personalities of the Rhine Province" responded to a request from the library and donated portrait photographs and autographs (often with self-biographical content) to the collection. Larger autograph complexes held together by writers or addressees, which were acquired in no small number in the following period, were generally not classified in the autograph collection, but as collections, partial bequests or splinter bequests in the group of S-signatures containing manuscripts of all kinds. In 1935 7057 autographs were counted, in the year 2007 the collection contained 7953 autographs; in addition further single autographs, which were not separated from the book because of the direct connection, are found as supplements in books. The location of these autographs results from the signature.
Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) was one of the best-known and most distinguished German historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He studied history in Leipzig and Göttingen, habilitated in Bonn in 1880 and worked at the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität first as a private lecturer and from 1888 as an extaordinarius. In 1890 he was called to Marburg and in 1891 to the University of Leipzig, where he worked until his death in 1915. In his research and publications, especially in his "Deutsche Geschichte" (German History) published between 1891 and 1909, Lamprecht stressed the importance of cultural history and the material prerequisites for the legal development of peoples and societies. In the course of this dispute, numerous historians took a stand against Lamprechts views and, in the tradition of Leopold von Rankes, emphasized the primacy of political and personal history. Today Karl Lamprecht is considered one of the founders of economic and social history. Other important fields of activity were the history of the country, university pedagogy and foreign cultural policy. 1915 Karl Lamprecht died leaving behind an extensive scientific legacy. In 1920 he was taken to Walbeck Castle (Geldern district), where his older daughter Marianne lived as the wife of the owner Walther Friedrich Klein-Walbeck since 1920. In 1931 and 1933, small parts of the estate were sent to the Leipzig Institute for Universal History, where they were either burned or badly damaged during the war. The remaining stock in Walbeck, or partially outsourced stock, also suffered damage from fire bombs and water during the Second World War. After the death of Marianne Klein-Walbeck (née Lamprecht) in 1946, the estate came into the possession of her younger sister Else Rose-Schütz (née Lamprecht). However, part of the estate was blasted off at that time and remained at Walbeck Castle, united with the Klein-Walbeck family archive. The Bonn University and State Library received the estate of Karl Lamprecht between 1957 and 2012 in a total of three tranches. The main estate remaining with Else Rose-Schütz (Tranche 1) was sold to the Bonn University Library in 1957. A very small part remained in family ownership. The part of the estate remaining on Klein-Walbeck (tranche 2) was deposited in the Kleve District Archive in 1996. In 2010, this part of the estate was transferred to the Bonn University and State Library. The positions that belonged to the Klein-Walbeck family archive in terms of cause and provenance remained in the district archive. In 2012, ULB Bonn received the letters still in family ownership (Tranche 3). In a project sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the entire estate in HANS was newly catalogued and verified in Kalliope. In addition, about two thirds of the documents have been digitised and are accessible online in the ULB's Digital Collections.