Скачать или смотреть Catalogue/Library (2012)

The Bodleian Library is the main library of the University of Oxford, whose direct origin dates back to the mid-fifteenth century when Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, donated his collection of manuscripts to the university. It is one of the oldest libraries in Europe. We made copies of “Catalogues/Library” book that consists of (1) modified tables from the first printed catalogue of the Bodleian Library by Thomas James, which was printed in 1605 and was the first widely distributed catalogue of its kind (2) and images of modern library worldwide collected and selected from public domains.

When designing this first printed catalogue, James envisioned that each table in the catalogue would primarily represent items on one shelf. These tables often held space for a future acquisition. However, in the first printed catalogue, he made use of this blank space to cross-reference items which were supposed to be on the shelf but were actually stored elsewhere. The tables and the number of pages have been modified in our “Catalogues/Library” books. The cross-references have been erased, and supportive features in the original catalogue such as index and guides were omitted, leaving the main and initial list only, which consisted of 397 pages of the 651 pages catalogue. The collected modern library images were catalogued as mirror images reflecting the erased blank space in the tables. These books were installed on the lecterns at the Duke Humfrey’s reading room at the Bodleian Library as objects for inquiring into the idea of readers and knowledge classification system.

Sohin Hwang, Jaekyung Jung