The last element of this first part of the installation consisted of a small duotone publication. This publication was made available for free and listed all of the catalogues on display, citing their bibliographic information and reference numbers in order to facilitate future investigation. The viewer was thus invited to further study this material on her own time, once the exhibition ended and each book had been returned to its original repository. This publication had the same function as a type of book popular in the 16 th century Europe: called “libraries,” these publications served as book catalogues, and were an important tool on a number of levels: to prove, for instance, the superiority of one language over another (French/Italian and Italian/Latin).1 The function of my publication was to catalogue a range of 100 found catalogues dating from 1959 until 2005.
