The box of crayons that belonged to Chekhov was bought by the writer in Moscow in the trading house ‘Muir and Meriliz’. The writer kept the pencils in a drawer of his writing desk in his office. The house-museum has a lot of printed materials with red, crimson, green marks left by the writer.

Chekhov brought only a small part of his personal library to Yalta. These were mainly books by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Nekrasov, Korolenko, Gorky and other Russian classics. Chekhov presented the rest of the books to his native city of Taganrog. On the pages of some of the publications stored in the Yalta House, marks left by the writer, as well as his autographs, have been preserved. The well-known employee of the Yalta house-museum Alla Vasilievna Khanilo studied these marks for a long time. In 2017, her collection of articles ‘Chekhov in Yalta’ was published.

Chekhov’s notes are found in many books, brochures, prospectus, price lists on plants. They were left by the writer during the period of arrangement of the wonderful Yalta garden. Among the books on gardening from the writer’s library stands out the publication ‘The Gardener’s Flora’, presented to Chekhov by Zolotarev, the editor of “Russian Thought”. This is a reference book with illustrations of plants for the vegetable garden and orchard, greenhouses and warmhouses. Zolotarev signed his gift: “To my dear friend Anton Pavlovich, to encourage gardening intentions.” Chekhov marked the flowers, bushes and trees he liked with a red, green or crimson pencil.

Many different catalogs, from which Chekhov purchased plants for the future garden, also remained. These are the Price List of seeds of the garden company from Riga, owned by Karl Ivanovich Wagner, the Catalog of the Sinop company from Sukhum-Kale, which belonged to the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich himself, the Price list of rose bushes of the E. G. Werkmeister’s Odessa garden institution, General catalog of the Rosen Brothers company located in the Dutch cities of Overven and Haarlem. In 2018, the writer’s house-museum in Yalta, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Crimea, published the catalog “The Unusual Garden of A. P. Chekhov.” Along with many items from the Yalta dacha, it also included these brochures.