THE WARBURG INSTITUTE: THE HAMBURG LIBRARY THAT ESCAPED THE NAZIS AND WAS REBORN IN LONDON

 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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