The Museum for Applied Arts and Industry spans the entire spectrum of European art history from Egyptian-Coptic decorated belts and bags and late-Romanesque book-covers to the Gothic period with an important collection of love boxes, richly decorated court weapons and furniture of the Renaissance up to the most exquisite products of artisanship at noble courts and middle-class houses of the 17th to 19th centuries. Again and again visitors admire the high artisan quality of the hand-gilded, embossed and painted small cabinets, relic boxes and wall coverings, the fine ornaments of bags, saddles, belts and clothing out of leather, the elaborately decorated and crafted European and Oriental book covers and, of course, the highlights: the largest known "unicorn" with its red leather, gilded casing to suit the enormous value it then had, Emperor Napoleon I of France’s briefcase or the Franco-Flemish love box "Sleeping Chivalry", from the second half of the 14th century, of which comparable pieces exist only in Paris and New York, and, and, and. Another always carefully followed subject of collection is the international bag and shoe design of the 20th and 21st centuries.
For all their openness to the world, the museum people do not forget their museum’s regional origin, the leather city Offenbach and the many small companies whose owners and employees are called, with affectionate irony, "Babbscher": since the late 18th century boxes, portfolios and purses could now, without compulsory guild membership, be manufactured by semi-skilled workers using uncomplicated gluing techniques instead of being entirely sewn (‘pappen’ - to glue). Out of the modest workshops of home industry large factories for exclusive bags, trunks and all kinds of cases developed, sold worldwide and partly marketed in their own chain stores under the label "Offenbacher Lederwaren". Some of the products of this nowadays almost completely foreign-produced industry is shown by the DLM in an extra department under the title "From Craft to Industry".

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