To some extent, a curatorial-editorial method involves creating discursive and aesthetic proposals by gathering and arranging various authors, sources, and materials (i.e., things, images, and texts) hosted within a space-time context of performativity, design, collaboration, and public exposure. While there are many forms of curatorial practice, as a publisher and editor with experience in exhibition-making I have long been invested in better understanding the “paginated” realm of books and libraries. Looking at Conrad Gessner’s bibliographic work is interesting here because it seems to present an earlyform of “constellational thinking” that cuts across the library, the books it holds (and those held elsewhere) as well as the individual chapters and pages themselves. Like the journals of researchers holding notes and data to be excerpted and reorganized later, the Biblioteca Universalis also represented a tool for referencing and producing ideas and scholarship in the future. In that sense, it was meant as a kind of manual for how reader-writers were supposed to approach and incorporate the mediated material for their own work. One recommendation suggested the use of a special folder to collect one’s compiled, essentially loose and potentially nonlinear excerpts. The pages could then be arranged and rearranged for one’s own texts and lectures. In Gessner’s words:

Whether they need to write or to give lectures, they may arrange the accumulated raw material for their paper in this way: Either they have recently collected material or they arrange material accumulated on slips of paper according to thematic aspects of reuse, so they can take out paper slips for the treatment of the respective object, selecting from the many cards those that are best suited for the present subject. Using small needles, they fixate the slips in the desired order for the respective lecture and write down what seems appropriate, or use it according to desire; finally, they restore the slips of paper to their place for reuse.²⁵

Gessner essentially describes the possibility of articulating new hypotheses by developing temporary relationships among the contents of a collected archive/repository of sources. The author’s focus is also on the originality of the constellation rather than on presenting individual sources in their original form. This emphasis on the usefulness of reproduction evokes the curatorial-editorial approach of composing on and with the mass-printed page.²⁶ And yet, from a current point of view it is also important to consider the specific ecologies of those elements accessed so as not to tear them out of context and impose meaning and/or sever meaningful connections that are already there.²⁷


Flights of Fancy – Arrivals

Returning to the legacy of Gessner’s ornithological work, the book on avifauna was a true success—no matter the amount of verbose half-knowledge it contained. The original Latin version was quickly translated into a very popular German Vogelbuch whose first, second, and third editions were published in 1557, 1582, and 1600 respectively. The birds portrayed in this oeuvre seemed to have shared Gessner’s bibliomaniacal spirit of existing among books, for they continued to flutter into the pages of numerous later naturalists’ subsequent publications. Ulisse Aldrovandi was among the first of these authors to eagerly recycle from Gessner; in 1599, 1600, and 1603, he published three volumes entitled Ornithologia. [Fig. 04] In the mid-seventeenth century, John Johnstone compiled yet another bird book containing almost entirely borrowed material, including many aesthetically pleasing illustrations copied directly from the books published by both Gessner and Aldrovandi.

In any case, originality in the context of these illustrations must be understood as a collaborative and ongoing interplay both regarding the artists and recurring visual referents. For instance, most of the 217 woodcuts in the first edition of De Avium Natura were not made by Gessner himself but were produced for him as he maintained a whole network of aesthetically gifted international correspondents, many of whom with more field experience with birds than Gessner.²⁸ While other publications such as the Frenchman Pierre Belon’s folio L’histoire de la nature des oyseaux (also published in 1555) presents visual material meticulously created by its author, Gessner’s De Avium much rather resembles a curatorial editorial space gathering artistic productions made by several different colleagues. Furthermore, also the individual images of the birds themselves often constituted a kind of pastiche or collage of already existing visual cues, including myths and documentary errors.