Riga - European Capital of Culture 2014 candidate

the book, 1514-2014Massys, Quentin. Der Goldwäger und seine Frau. (1514)‘I stare at the textual field on my friend’s screen and I am unpersuaded.Indeed, this glimpse of the future–if it is the future–has me clinging all the more tightly to my books, the very ideaof them. If I ever took them for granted, I do no longer. I nowsee each one as a portable enclosure, a place I can repair to torelease the private, unsocialized, dreaming self. A book is solitude,privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crushof the outer world. Hypertext – at least the spirit of hypertext,which I see as the spirit of the times – promises to deliver mefrom this, to free me from the ‘liberating domination‘ of the author.It promises to spring me from the univocal linearity whichis precisely the constraint that fills me with a sense of possibilityas I read my way across fixed acres of print.‘Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg ElegiesThe opening of the new Latvian National Library building isplanned for 2013. It will be more than just a significant Europeancultural event in architecture – Riga will be the European bookcapital in 2014. After moving to its new premises, the LatvianNational Library is going to organise a large-scale book exhibit“The Book 1514-20014“ (Grāmata 1514-2014), dedicated tohumanity’s history in reading over the past 500 years. Manyunique books will be brought to Riga. An international conference“The Content of the 21 st Century” is also planned. SvenBirkerts – the American writer and literary critic – has been invitedto be the patron of the conference. He happens to be the son ofthe architect of the most significant building to be built in Riga inthe years since the restoration of independence - the new NationalLibrary. The theme of the conference will be the history of reading.Among the participants expected are the Nobel Prize laureatesin literature V .S. Naipaul and Imre Kertész; Harold Bloom, one ofthe world’s leading literature critics; the linguist Noam Chomsky;the philosopher Alexander Piatigorsky; the writers Umberto Eco,Tatyana Tolstaya, Václav Havel, and Jānis Krēsliņš; the foundersof Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and other luminaries.The conference will take place at the same time as the opening ofthe exhibit “The Book” 1514-20141514 is unique in the history of the European book. It is the agewhen the printed book has already stepped out of its cradle(incunabula in Latin). The next era has begun with its brightestsigns – the high Renaissance and the Reformation. The bookloses the features of a manuscript and new traditions in printingand publishing emerge – it is the time of the appearance of titlepages, illustrations (engravings), printed works in local languages,printed music scores, etc. 1514 is the very special year that marksthe border between the passing and the coming ages.Hartmann Schedel – the author of the “World Chronicle” (1493) –dies in 1514. Notably, it is in this year that the Abbot of TrittenheimJohannes Heidenberg publishes his inventory of books printedsince Gutenberg’s invention came about, abate Tritemioscrive la Cronaca Irsaugense che reca importanti precisazionisull’invenzione di Gutenberg. This year brings forth several outstandingworks by his contemporaries. At least six (!) books byErasmus of Rotterdam are published (Parabolarum and others).It is very likely that the manuscript of Till Eulenspiegel was beingprepared by a typesetter to be printed in the following year.Also in the year 1514, Copernicus mentions his work on developingthe description of heliocentric system in the manuscript“Small Commentaries” (Commentariolus) that he distributes to hisfriends. Several engravings by the distinguished Albrecht Dürerappear (Melencolia I, Der heilige Hieronymus im Gehäus). Thebooks of John Rastell also should be mentioned, as well as thepapal bull of Leo X (1475—1521) and the letter of England’s KingHenry VIII to the Pope.The range of books in 1514 includes classics (at least nine worksby Cicero, three by Ovid, five by Plautus, two by Pliny, four byVirgil, as well as works by Aristotle, Horace, Plutarch, Ptolemyand Seneca), the famous Biblia Poliglota, and Avicenna’s Florescollecti superquinque Canonibus quos adidit in medicina (Lyons)as well as works by the Renaissance master Boccaccio and byJoannes Eckius (Johann Eck) – the future ardent antagonist ofMartin Luther – who writes about the coming years. This is oneof the brightest years in the era’s art of printing. 1514 sees the appearanceof books printed by Aldus Manutius (1449/1450—1515)in Venice (Scriptores rei rusticae), the Athenaeus of Philippus andLucas Antonius Giunta in Florence, Cicero’s letters to Atticam,Johann Froben (c. 1460—1527) sheltered and published Erasmus38 39