My guest today is Bill Sherman, who is the director of the Warburg Institute since 2017, following a distinguished career in academia and museums, most recently at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he was director of Research and Collections and head of the V&A Research Institute. In today's episode, we explore how one man's true passion for books and deep sense of curiosity led to the creation of one of the world's most unique and influential libraries. In the late 1870s in Hamburg, Germany, a young boy named Aby Warburg was the heir of a wealthy and influential family of German-Jewish bankers who had built their bank over generations. But Aby Warburg didn't have a head for numbers in business, but rather for books. When he was barely a teen, he made a deal with his little brother Max that he would forfeit to him his right to manage the family bank if Max agreed to provide him with as many books as he wanted for the rest of his life. This deal and his extensive studies in art history and his research into indigenous tribes built the foundation for what would become the Warburg Library for Cultural Knowledge in Hamburg.

The library was moved from Hamburg to London in 1934 after the Nazis came to power in Germany. In London, it became the renowned Warburg Institute, which is located today in Woburn Square in London and is part of the University of London. It's a library with over 360,000 volumes, the largest collection in the world focused on the afterlife of antiquity and the transmission of culture, with a special emphasis on medieval and renaissance studies.

Visit the Warburg Insititute: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/

Find out more about Bill Sherman: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/people/bill-sherman

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