The Librarian's Atlas

A history of early modern libraries and the imperial desire for total knowledge. Medieval scholars imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but as novel early modern ways of managing information facilitated empire in both the New and Old Worlds, the world became a projection of the library. In The Librarian's Atlas, Seth Kimmel offers a sweeping material history of how the desire to catalog books coincided in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the aspiration to control territory. Through a careful study of library culture in Spain and Morocco--close readings of catalogs, marginalia, indexes, commentaries, and maps--Kimmel reveals how the book-lover's dream of a comprehensive and well-organized library shaped an expanded sense of the world itself.