Laird Collection

The Laird collection is comprised of 37 works on Marxist philosophy, published between 1901 and 1959. The collection was donated to the Turnbull Library on 27 October 1961 by Mr A.M. Laird of Wellington, New Zealand. It is part of the Turnbull Named Collections.

The majority of works in this collection are written by or about German philosophers Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The collection includes key works such as The Communist Manifesto and Capital: a critique of political economy. Most items are published by Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company: Chicago, a notable publisher of socialist literature in the USA.

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and the father of Marxist theory alongside Karl Marx.

Cover of Karl Marx's Wage-labour and Capital, with an inlaid illustration of a muscled arm holding a hammer.
Karl Marx, Wage-labor and capital, 1902. Record page

Access items in this collection

Original items in this collection can be requested through the Library’s catalogue and consulted in the Katherine Mansfield Reading Room.

This collection is catalogued online and may be called up as a list on the National Library catalogue by searching ‘Laird’ using the ‘in call number’ search option in the NLNZ catalogue advanced search.