#magmd

Kurt Vonnegut

Located within the campus area of University of London, the Warburg Institute Library originated from the personal collection of the art historian Aby Warburg in Hamburg, Germany. It was moved to London in 1933 for protection from the Nazi. On Wednesday morning, we were welcomed in by the Institute’s librarian Nessa Malone and archivist Claudia Wedepohl, who first revealed to us that the word “Mnemosyne”- engraved at the entrance of the Institute in ancient Greek, means “Memory”, which appeared to be a fitting keyword for our theme “In Search of Storytellers”. 

Getting inside the building, we were introduced to the library’s famous system of thematic classification, which divides the entire collection into four main sections: Image, Word, Orientation and Action. This system was designed by Warburg and his assistants based on the process through which human awareness developed, with the Visual Image as its first state; followed by Language and Literature, leading to the search for the Orientations: religion, science and philosophy. These Orientations then influence human behaviours, rituals and the history of social and political events – the Actions. The books, in this context are arranged in a chronological and geographical order which, according to Claudia, makes it a better structure for wandering among the shelves and through this random browsing, we can see in general how the disciplines changed and how they are related to each other throughout time (years, centuries) and space (countries, regions). Due to this highly interdisciplinary nature, the library does not serve well the purpose of looking at one section of books for a specific subject matter, a fact we also discovered later while trying to browse through the shelves for our quick Image hunt exercise.