Profiles of book collection are a crucial source for the history of ideas. Yet, the study of libraries in the Arab lands prior to and during the Crusader period has largely relied on evidence from narrative sources, especially chronicles/biographical dictionaries, and to a lesser extent endowment records. This paper is based on the recently discovered library catalogue that documents the book collection of the Ayyubid Ashrafiya Mausoleum in Damascus. The Ashrafiya mausoleum was a comparatively minor institution in the educational landscape of the town, but it held more than 2.000 volumes. The only field of scholarship that the Ashrafiya’s endowment supported with a paid position was Koran recitation. However, the library had no distinct profile in this field, nor in any other of the ‘religious’ sciences, such as exegesis, law and hadith. Furthermore, this collection does not display any specifically ‘anti-Crusader’ profile. Rather the most prominent field was that of adab literature and especially poetry, so that the diwans of the famous pre-Islamic poets such as Imru? al-Qays b. Hujr, al-Mutalammis, Salama b. Jandal, 'Alqama b. 'Abada and Umayya Ibn Abi Salt as well as those of the early Islamic poets such as al-Mutanabbi, al-Buhturi, al-Sari b. Ahmad al-Raffa' and Abu Tammam were held in numerous copies. In the same vein, the Maqamat of al-Hariri and al-Tha'alibi’s Yatimat al-dahr were at the reader’s disposal in more than 10 copies each. The profile of the Ashrafiya library is particularly striking if compared to the collections of religious scholars for which we have some evidence from narrative sources. In these ‘private’ collections the religious sciences and the auxiliary sciences such as grammar, lexicography, morphology and history represented always the bulk of the titles. The social background of the library’s founder, a member of the civilian elite, as well as the distinct profile of its titles, including for instance manuals for traders, indicates the broad readership that this library was meant to serve.