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 booklover’s dream of a comprehensive and well-organized library shaped an expanded sense of the world itself.

Seth Kimmel is associate professor of Latin American and Iberian cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

List of Figures
Introduction Books in Place
One Hernando Colón’s Cosmography
Two Routes of Antiquarianism: From Seville to San Lorenzo
Three A Universal Library for Philip II: Juan Páez de Castro and the Escorial’s Order of Knowledge
Four Biblioteca and Biblia: Benito Arias Montano’s Logics of Place
Five This Holy Land: Semitic Philology and Peninsular Toponymy
Six Spanish Orientalism and Saʿadī Cultures of the Catalog
Conclusion: “Libraries” and the Shape of Knowledge
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index