At Geneva's Bodmer Foundation, a new director makes the case for the physical book

Marc Adam Kolakowski has only just taken up his post as director of the Fondation Martin Bodmer, in Cologny near Geneva, but he already knows its holdings well, Le Temps reports. The foundation's collection spans five millennia and includes some 150,000 documents from 80 different cultures, among them a fragment of Homer's Odyssey dating to the second century BC, an Assyrian clay tablet, and a manuscript by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

For Kolakowski, standing before such objects is an irreplaceable experience: something is transmitted through the material support of a text that a digitized version cannot carry. He traces this idea back to the foundation's founder, Martin Bodmer (1899-1971), who spoke of the "magic" of manuscripts, borrowing the word from the writer and bibliophile Stefan Zweig, whose collection Bodmer had acquired. "Il faut offrir au plus grand nombre l'occasion de ressentir cette magie," Kolakowski told Le Temps.

He says he felt that aura himself in 2005, as a student at the University of Geneva, when he and classmates were allowed to consult illuminated manuscripts at the foundation recounting the death of King Arthur. "J'ai pris conscience que le texte n'est pas une pure abstraction, qu'il s'inscrit dans une matérialité, une histoire dont l'interprétation nous oblige parfois à changer notre regard sur son contenu," he said, describing what he calls "textual genetics" — the study of a text's material history.

Asked about dematerialization and artificial intelligence, and amid broader worries about the state of culture, Kolakowski struck an optimistic note.

L'Histoire nous montre que, si décadence il y a, elle est systématiquement suivie d'une renaissance.

Marc Adam Kolakowski, in Le Temps