MARTIN BODMER FOUNDATION LIBRARY - GENEVA
Great Collection of World Literature in Switzerland
Lovers of literature and early writings should not miss the Bodmer Foundation
while in Geneva. Martin Bodmer was the son of wealthy parents from Zurich,
born in 1899 who inherited a large fortune from his father. He began
utilizing his inheritacnce to begin collecting books at the early age
of 16, devoted to the idea of gathering the world’s great books
and early writing into an library to illustrate what he saw as the five
pillars of world literature and knowledge and what he called "the
entire span of human reflection and feeling”. He collected works
of religion, science, drama, music and literature. After the first world
war he traveled to the United States and Paris. In 1921, he established
the Gottfired Keller Prize, Swiss award for literatary achievement.
Martin Bodmer’s ever growing collection of works soon filled his
neo-Baroque villa on the shored of Lake Geneva in the upper crust neighborhood
of Cologny, not far from where Lord Bryon and the Shelleys spent the
famous literary "Gothic Summer" (see Bryon’s
Villa Geneva) and in 1928 bought a former school building next door to house
his books. Martin Bodmer died in 1971, turning down an offer to sell
his collection, but rather establishing a family foundation to carry
on his life’s work. In 2003, a new library was built below ground
next to the original Bodmer Villa. The building was designed by Mario
Botta as a contemperay subterranian temple to literaure and knowledge,
and is a journey through the past of great and very rare works to be
found nowhere else on view in one location.
The
Bodmer Foundation Library holds the collection of almost 160,000 items,
with portions on display in rotating exhibitions. Major religious works
to be found include a Guttenberg Bible (see Gutenberg
Museum Mainz ),
dating from 1492, the only one in Switzerland, a first printing edition
of Martin Luther’s 95
Thesis (see Church
Doors Wittenberg), most famously the Papyrus’,
segments of scrolls in Greek and Coptic, including the oldest surviving
copy of the Gospel of James, as well as other texts of the
Gospels from both New and Old Testament, with segments of the controversial
Gnostic
Gospels, like the Gospel of Judas. Works of literarture and
science include a copy of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophae
Principia Mathematica, an original manuscript of a Mozart string
quintet, original editions
of Don Quixote, Faust, Shakespeare folios, illustrated
Edger Allen Poe, the original manuscript of a printers edition of Grimm's
Fairy Tales (see German
Fairy Tale Trail)
and the original hand-written scroll manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s 120
Days of Sodom, as well as Greek poetic drama and Eqyptian
works.
Visiting the Bodmer Library Collection
The
Martin Bodmer Foundation Library is open Tuesdays to Sundays from 2pm
to 6pm, closed on Mondays. Admission is 12 CHF, with reduced admission
of
10 CHF for seniors and students. The Colongy neighborhood is on the
south
side of Lake Geneva, served by bus line A, or a short drive by car
with parking at the Le Forge Restaurant next door, a nice spot to stop
for
a meal to catch your breath. © Bargain
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