Aby Warburg’s library opened in Hamburg in 1926. In Manguel’s telling, Warburg incessantly arranged and rearranged his books, moving titles from shelf to shelf in an attempt to map the paths among them. Visitors spoke of books of literature shelved next to those on geography, art history leaning against philosophy. At one point, unable to move the books at the speed of his mind, Warburg resorted to tacking notecards to a cloth—each card relating a text or image, their placement on the cloth relating them to other texts. The cards could be lifted and moved around at will—a visualization of the ongoing, cacophonous conversation around them.

His was a library as creative act—it exchanged the rigor of a single taxonomy for one that was fluid, eccentric, human. In so doing he delayed the act of finding a text indefinitely. You didn’t so much as look for a book as look for the thread that linked it to its neighbor; you didn’t rest on a single title, but instead travelled through them all, assured that wherever you were going, you would never arrive.