Newberry Library

The Newberry Library is an independent research library in Chicago, founded in 1887 with money left by the businessman Walter L. Newberry. It specializes in the humanities, including history, maps, genealogy and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Through the collector Edward E. Ayer, who bought the manuscript in 1887 and gave it to the library from 1912, it holds the oldest known text of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K'iche' Maya. The original 16th-century K'iche' book is lost. Between about 1700 and 1715 the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez, a priest in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, copied it in K'iche' alongside a Spanish translation. That manuscript is the only surviving copy.

The Newberry has digitized the manuscript and made it freely available online, along with explanatory material on its history. Scholars use it as the base text for modern translations of the Popol Vuh, which preserves the K'iche' account of the world's creations, the Hero Twins and the lineages of K'iche' rulers.