Catalog

Ferrare, October 2017

Some ceilings of the municipal library were magnificent, remains of a medieval and post-medieval splendor. But the interior of the Palazzo Paradiso attracted less curious tourists than academics, with its collections of rare manuscripts, still accessible on site and certainly not on the web.
To do this, we must first know the book entry, using traditional cardboard cards of our youth. But here there are no drawers and large heavy furniture gathering files for every book, only small connected objects, alphabetically classified. While being solid, the catalog becomes mobile and manipulable, at the risk that users wrongly reclassify or even lose them.
A Borgesian dream of is then possible: the catalogs having become books, we shall manufacture the catalog of catalogs to hold the whole of the library in a single hand.