The personal working library of famed deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) arrived at Princeton University’s Firestone Library just three weeks ago and scholarly blogs and social media sites are already buzzing with the news.

One Columbia University professor has called it “an inestimable treasure; working materials from the most important philosopher of reading of our times.”

“And all of that is before we’ve even finished bringing all the books out of their international shipping crates,” said librarian David Magier, who works in collection development. The collection is still being unpacked from giant wooden crates shipped air freight from Paris.

Researchers believe that access to central works in the Derrida collection will allow scholars and students to examine the development of the philosopher’s thinking in new ways. While Mr. Derrida’s papers are archived at the University of California, Irvine, the 13,800 collection of published books and other materials brought to Princeton will reveal what Derrida was reading.

And since Mr. Derrida actively engaged with the texts he read and covered pages with notes and cross-references, it is hoped that this material will reveal much about its owner. As Derrida himself said in an interview later in his life, his books bear “traces of the violence of pencil strokes, exclamation points, arrows, and underlining.”

“Reading marginal notes, we stand at the scholar’s shoulder and listen in on the discussion between scholar and author, as it takes place,” said Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History. “It is wonderful, in an ironic way that would have appealed to no one more than Jacques Derrida, that scholars and students will be able to reconstruct his part in this great humanistic tradition in Firestone Library.”

“Derrida developed his own thought through a meticulous engagement with other thinkers, past and present, thinkers who at once constitute the Western traditions of philosophy and literature and defy them (indeed they constitute them in part because they defied them),” said Hal Foster, the University’s Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, and co-director, Program in Media and Modernity. “What a boon it is for us at Princeton to have his notes on these thinkers and writers, to see the master of textuality perform, as it were, on other master texts.”

Known as the founder of “deconstruction,” an investigative technique that finds inherent contradictions in a subject as part of an analysis of meaning, in political institutions as well as texts, the famously controversial Algerian-born French philosopher is considered one of the most influential thinkers, writers, and critics in the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, art and architecture, linguistics, and political theory, among others.

According to Mr. Magier, the library acquisition is something of a coup. It belonged to Mr. Derrida’s widow Marquerite, who had kept his study and his vast collection wonderfully intact since his death. “A number of scholars eager to get this collection preserved and to make it broadly accessible for academic research approached us in the library and urged us to explore the possibility of acquiring the collection,” he said.

University representatives visited the Derrida home outside of Paris to examine the collection. “While there were many logistical complexities, the outcome in terms of the benefit for scholars everywhere is definitely worth it,” said Mr. Mangier.

The acquisitions process took more than a year of discussions and complex arrangements coordinated by the Collection Development Department. But now that the library is here, it is being unpacked, sorted, described, organized, preserved, and housed as speedily as possible so as to be available through Firestone Library’s department of rare books and special collections. With that, scholars will be able to “deconstruct” the philosopher’s own reading habits.

“Derrida’s working library fits perfectly with current interdisciplinary campus interest in understanding how an individual person’s library, particularly when it is significantly annotated as Derrida’s is, can be ‘unpacked’ and analyzed to track the development of his or her thinking as well as the role of reading and its connection to writing,” said Mr. Magier.