Inside an unremarkable 1950s red-brick building in Bloomsbury — London’s academic heartland — lies what has been described as ‘the world’s weirdest library’.Little-known beyond art-history circles, it’s called the Warburg Institute, and it houses nearly 400,000 books dedicated to the study of the transmission of symbols from antiquity to the Renaissance — with a reputation for focusing on the esoteric. Had Dan Brown’s fictitious Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, been real, wrote Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, this is where you’d find him.
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The other day I was poking around in PaleoJudaica and I came across an in-progress story from 2014 which I had forgotten. It was about a court case to decide whether the Warburg Library in London could retain its own identity or whether the University of London could shut it down and absorb its books into its other collections. I posted about it here and here. The underlying articles are now both behind subscription walls, but you can get the gist from the quotations.
This recent (November 2024) Christie's article relates the happy ending:
Fast-forward to 2014, as London rents spiralled, and a legal row about the fate of the library reached the city’s courts. On one side was the university, looking to clarify the terms of the deed, signed during the stresses of the Second World War. On the other was the Warburg Advisory Council (and members of the Warburg family), voicing a fear that the institute could lose its identity, swallowed up among the millions of books held nearby at Senate House Library.The Library was saved and has just undergone a major refurbishment. Its vast collection of esoterica remain available for study in its own dedicated building. For more details see the Christie's article.After 10 days of deliberation, the judge ruled that the deed was iron-clad, and from that decision came £9.5 million, the core of the budget for the recent redevelopment.
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