The Wason Collection houses close to 9000 volumes in Tibetan, one of the larger repositories of Tibetan culture in the United States. Textual material about Tibet from a western perspective originated mostly with British surveys and travelogues, and there exist lesser known sources in Chinese which date back many centuries, and which may have contributed to the history of printing in Tibet itself, especially Derge. Anthropological surveys in the Himalayas constitute a unique fusion of ethnological and topographical wonder of a geographic and spiritual region of staggering proportion. Sacred texts of Buddhist and Bon traditions, but also literature, medical texts, cosmology, history and biographical writing also belong to the Tibetan scriptural legacy.