In 1933, with books being burned
across Germany, a collection of 60,000 art-historical tomes was shipped to
England by steamer. Now, ‘the world’s weirdest library’ has reopened after a
£14.5-million transformation
Inside an unremarkable 1950s
red-brick building in Bloomsbury — London’s academic heartland — lies what has
been described as ‘the world’s weirdest library’.
Little-known beyond art-history
circles, it’s called the Warburg Institute, and it houses nearly 400,000 books
dedicated to the study of the transmission of symbols from antiquity to the
Renaissance — with a reputation for focusing on the esoteric. Had Dan Brown’s
fictitious Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, been real, wrote
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, this is where you’d find him.
Rows of steel shelves underneath
fluorescent lights are arranged over floors named ‘Word’, ‘Action’, ‘Image’ and
‘Orientation’. Each book is sorted according to a unique system called the ‘law
of the good neighbour’, whereby the volumes above, below and on either side are
supposed to inspire serendipitous paths of thought.
For example, in the ‘Prophecy of
Divinatory Practices’ section, books about fortune-telling are surrounded by
texts on comets, monsters, dreams and chess. Others have labels such as
‘Pilgrimage’, ‘Cosmology’, ‘Magic’, ‘Monasticism’ and ‘Mysticism’.
‘Aby Warburg said the book you
need is always next to the one you’re looking for,’ explains Bill Sherman, a
professor of cultural history and the institute’s director since 2017. For the
past six years he’s been overseeing a £14.5-million transformation of the
Warburg — a delicate balancing act, he says, between maintaining the
institute’s eccentricities and making it a centre fit for modern study.
Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg in
1866. The scion of a Jewish banking dynasty, at the age of 13 he sold his
first-born rights to his brother in return for all the books he ever wanted.
By 1888 he was living in Florence,
scrutinising the pagan roots of Botticelli’s motifs. This study of decoding
symbols and tracing their evolution developed into a field he named
‘iconology’. In 1904 he acquired an assistant to begin cataloguing his collection
of 3,500 books, and within a decade — inside his Hamburg home — he had
established ‘a working laboratory’ for scholars, which was listed on the
country’s inter-library loan network.
Yet despite being a gifted art
historian, Warburg was plagued by bouts of depression and psychosis. In 1918 he
was admitted to an asylum.
When he was released after six
years, he returned to find that, under the direction of the art historian Fritz
Saxl, his collection had tripled in size, and regularly hosted popular
lectures. Two years later, he spent a small fortune creating a purpose-built,
state-of-the-art home for it.
Warburg died in 1929, before he
could finish his magnum opus, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne — an attempt to
synthesise the transmission of potent symbols through cultures by pinning
networks of thousands of images across more than 60 giant wooden panels. Less
than four years later, the Nazis rose to power.
Following book-burning rallies,
and on account of the faith of the institute’s founder and scholarly circle,
the Warburg Institute’s work became impossible. In 1933, with the aid of the
industrialist and collector Samuel Courtauld, the building’s 60,000 books,
together with its staff, were shipped by steamer to safety in London. In 1944,
Warburg’s family signed the institute over to the University of London in
return for securing — and funding — its future.
Fast-forward to 2014, as London
rents spiralled, and a legal row about the fate of the library reached the
city’s courts. On one side was the university, looking to clarify the terms of
the deed, signed during the stresses of the Second World War. On the other was
the Warburg Advisory Council (and members of the Warburg family), voicing a
fear that the institute could lose its identity, swallowed up among the
millions of books held nearby at Senate House Library.
After 10 days of deliberation, the
judge ruled that the deed was iron-clad, and from that decision came £9.5
million, the core of the budget for the recent redevelopment.
Dubbed the ‘Warburg Renaissance’,
the overhaul — led by Stirling Prize-winning architects Haworth Tompkins, whose
previous clients include the Royal College of Art and the London Library — has
seen the building’s old courtyard turned into a modern, climate-controlled
reading room for special collections and the photography archive, alongside a
futuristic, 140-seat auditorium.
On the ground floor, staff offices
have made way for a public exhibition space, one end of which contains Edmund
de Waal’s library of exile, a porcelain-bound installation of books dedicated
to lost libraries, initially created for the 2019 Venice Biennale. Come January
2025, the other end will host a show examining the history of tarot, featuring
designs by the occultist Aleister Crowley from the Warburg’s own archive.
Upstairs, the stacks have been
reworked to their original form. ‘We’ve undone a number of things that happened
in the 1980s and 1990s. We had these long tunnels of books with no natural
light, so they’ve been restored to the former layout, and in almost every case
you can see a window now,’ says Sherman.
The library’s novel organisational
system has also been tidied up. ‘As the collection grew, the integrity of the
four floors was lost, and two got spread out over multiple floors. I’ve
reinstated the purity of each.’
Similarly, the ‘law of the good
neighbour’ has remained. As a result, readers are still free to roam — an
increasingly rare feature of modern libraries — and discover recent
publications sandwiched between centuries-old texts, some containing the
original bookplates of Warburg himself, or other famous faculty members, such
as Michael Baxandall, Frances Yates and Ernst Gombrich. Gombrich was director
of the institute between 1959 and 1976, and his Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano
still stands in a corner of the building.
‘You want to keep the feeling of
what made somewhere special,’ says Sherman. ‘But it was a very analogue
institution.’
With as few as 2,000 current
members, where is the new blood he hopes to draw to the Warburg going to come
from? ‘It’s a research institute and most of its activities are academic, and
those are still the core,’ he says. ‘But through areas of cultural activity,
like residences, commissions and exhibitions, we’re hopefully introducing what
the place has to offer to a much wider range of people.
‘Artists and curators have
secretly used the Warburg for research for decades. I recently did an event at
a gallery where an artist said to me, “I have to confess to you, I lied in
order to gain access to the Warburg!” I don’t want people to have to lie anymore.
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