Abstract
Today, no one could claim to have read everything. However, there was a time when such a claim was still possible, just after the invention of printing. The lecture reviews a few examples of these humanist dreams of perfect libraries: Conrad Gessner's Bibliotheca universalis, Anton Francesco Doni's Libraria , Jean Trithème's Catalogus illustrium virorum Germaniae, and John Bale'sIllustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum summarium.
In principle, there is no such thing as a perfect library. But the dream of the perfect library runs through the centuries, the dream of a library that would signify agreement between the world and the mind that thinks it.
"Institute of universal energetic orientation", "organ of restitution for wounded human souls", "metaphorical orientation in space and time": these three expressions capture the spiritual, mystical and cosmic dimension of the Warburg Library. It is the totality of mental experience that is reconstituted by Warburg's library, with a form in homology with the cranium. This is an illustration of a perfect library. But to entrust such a sublime mission to the library is to risk failure. The dream of the perfect library may well turn into a nightmare.
There's a fine line between dream and nightmare. The most illustrious example of the nightmare of the total library is Borges' "The Library of Babel", a library made monstrous by the tyranny of numbers. The Library of Babel is a nightmare for two reasons: firstly, because the numbers multiply beyond reason, and secondly, because this library is not ordered; it is not classified. It also poses metaphysical problems.
