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From the great ancient libraries of Pergamum and Alexandria to the fantasy in Borges' short story La biblioteca de Babel, a library is always more than just a collection of texts: it is at once a commitment and a testimony to learning and to scholarship. In Cologny near Geneva and in Küsnacht near Zurich are two more personal, more bourgeois, but nevertheless significant libraries, one belonging to the Swiss bibliophile and collector Martin Bodmer and the other to C. G. Jung. At once an exhibition catalogue and an illustrated monograph, Sonu Shamdasani's account of Jung's life as a ‘biography in books' offers a fascinating insight into what a scholar's library reveals about its owner: the superb photography in this volume beautifully documents what Jung's ‘memories’, his ‘dreams’, and his ‘reflections’ looked like — on paper.
A recurring dream of Jung in the 1920s provides the starting-point of this journey through his collection, but in fact a yearning for a well-stocked library had been characteristic of Jung since he was young. From his researches into mythology, folklore, and religion, Jung came to develop his notion of the collective unconscious, which could be understood as a kind of ‘library within’ (p. 49). As well as reading books and writing them (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido appeared in ), from 1913 onward Jung commenced work on an unusual bibliophilic project: the creation of his own special book of visions and fantasies, his Red Book (or Liber Novus). Incorporating motifs both from world mythology (such as Izdubar, also known as Gilgamesh) and from the banality, commonplaceness, and trashiness of popular culture, the composition of the Red Book gave Jung ‘a new understanding of how to read’ (p. 83). On this point Shamdasani is — rightly — insistent: ‘While Jung's self-investigations marked a turn away from scholarship, his fantasies and his reflections upon them palpably remained those of a scholar’, so it is vital to appreciate that ‘Jung'