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Abstract

In the late seventies, I was asked to work on classifying our Philosophy (and Psychology) collections, which were still located partly in the stacks and partly in the so-called Seminars-a traditional didactic and research structure of our School-where the books were mostly ordered by format or collection title. As often happens, my task was not completely free of restrictions: the general "new policy" of the entire Library was oriented toward accomplishing an open-shelf decimal classification, and the first step was to avoid an overly complicated schema, as this would probably have rendered more difficult the task of the end users, that is, our students but mainly our teaching staff. At the Scuola Normale Superiore, where historicism has always had an illustrious though somewhat cumbersome tradition (I quote only two philosophers and/or historians of Philosophy: Giovanni Gentile and Eugenio Garin), ordering the Philosophy collection- with its divisions, topics, geographical notations, chronological tables et similia-strictly by the Dewey decimal system might have been unthinkable. A second requirement was to designate a main location to the large collection of the often "complete works" of the philosophical Tradition. This way, the ideal Reader, foreseen to linger for hours in the newly restored library building of the Palazzo della Gherardesca, could easily access the reservoir of the great texts, which were to be followed on the shelves by the secondary literature ad auctorem. All in all, the implicit message to our students and scholars was to be the virtuous necessity of finding, ready on the shelves, the substantial core of the textual Tradition.

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