From the ancient times Mongols have a reverence for books and considered them as one of the three holy objects. History shows that nomadic Mongolia itself was respected for being as one of the three highly educated oriental states. As for books, except for the famous "The secret history of the Mongols" with 760 years of history, no earlier precedent has been found. Historical facts proved that the Mongols 2500 years ago knew not only a script but also the art of producing books. For example, in the State Central library we can see a book written on tree bark from this period. Readers at the Central library also have the opportunity of acquainting themselves with "Ganjuur" and "Danjuur", extremely rare Tibetan books of the llth century.
They set forth the fundamentals of ancient Indian sciences, philosophy, medicine, art, logic, grammar and astronomy. It proves that books were printed in Mongolia a thousand years ago. "Ganjuur" was printed by xylographic method in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Mongolian. The Mongolian translation of Ganjuur (109 volumes) and Danjuur (226 volumes) contains the fundamentals of the five ancient Indian sciences. Another book is the sacred sutra "Sunduin jud", created at the beginning of the 20th century by well-known jeweller Dagva and others.
Each of the 111 pages of the book is a thin silver plate, and the letters are engraved and covered with gold. The title page bears a relief representation of Buddhist gods embellished with coral and pearl. In total 52 kilograms of gold and 400 kilograms of silver were used for the creation of the sacred sutra. In fact, it is an art work in the application of the "nine precious" materials for making books: gold, steel, silver, pearl, coral, turquoise, azurite, mother-of-pearl, copper, all ground to powder. Since the era of printing books by modern methods about 9 million books on 800 topics have been published per year, which averages 7-10 books per person.
