The Museum of Signed and First-Edition Books is housed in the Cennet Culture and Arts Centre in Küçükçekmece, and the municipality that runs it describes it as the first museum in Türkiye built on this idea. The idea is to treat a book as two things at once: a cultural product and an object of the plastic arts.
Arranged by date of publication, the collection is meant to be read as a chronology — how Türkiye's technological, artistic and cultural changes showed up in the paper, the design and the graphics of its books. Signed copies add a second layer: the story of how a book came to be published, and what the author was thinking when they signed it, which the museum collects as documentation rather than anecdote. Its stated aim is to build up a first-hand source base for the history of visual art in the country, and to give readers a stronger sense of the object in their hands than reading alone provides.
The museum also intends to work as a living institution rather than a display case, with literary and cultural events, conferences, seminars and workshops — reading workshops, writing workshops, and sessions on short stories and folk tales. A catalogue of the exhibited works is published on the museum's page.
The 89A İETT line between Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Hospital and Zeytinburnu runs along the street, as does the Sefaköy-Marmaray-Çam Sakura minibus route. Coming by metrobus, get off at Cennet, walk to the end of Hürriyet Caddesi, turn right, and the building is 300 metres further on the right.
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- 10:00 - 20:00, closed Monday
When to go
- Climate
- Across İstanbul as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.8 °C in January to 24.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (99 mm) and lightest in July (22 mm). Long-term means for 1950-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
