The Great Martin Bodmer Library
Translation: Ainara Braña
We travel to Cologny, on the outskirts of Geneva, where a cultural treasure of first magnitude is located. We will travel to the Martin Bodmer Foundation’s museum and library, declared World’s Memory by UNESCO in 2015.
Its founder is the one who gives name to this institution: the Swiss Martin Bodmer, born in 1899 and deceased in 1917. The young Martin started collecting rare books at the age of 16 and he devoted all his life to the creation of an extraordinary library of universal literature. Also, he did not settle for just any edition: he started looking for autographs, incunable books or even papyruses, ancient tablets, and other written texts from the dawn of humanity, as we will see below.
The headquarters of his library were located in Zurich and Munich and finally ended up in Cologny near Geneva in a great building that possesses nothing but 150.000 literary registers that Martin Bodmer possessed throughout his life. These works gather the most important messages of humanity, including not only literature and art, but also, religion, history and politics. In fact, when Martin Bodmer was older, an American magnate tried to buy him all his library, but he declined the offer as he wanted to leave the library as a legacy to his Foundation, so that everybody could enjoy it.
The main collection of the library is composed of 200 western and 100 eastern manuscripts, around 2000 signed documents and 270 incunable ( a tenth part of which are very strange and unique). Then there are the strange printed works of which there are a thousand original editions that dated back from the XVI to the XX century.
These masterpieces included different copies of The Book of the Dead, Corpus of Dante with three manuscripts of The Divine Comedy from the XIV century, manuscripts from works by Virgili or Saint Thomas Aquinas and the second part of Goethe’s Fausto with 400 verses written by hand by the author.
This is not the end of it. We, as well, have the corpus of The Bodmer Papyri, which is composed by around 1800 pages in coptic and greek about Christian and pagan topics. There are also treasures from Spain, such as the collection of Lope de Vega with signed documents, editio princeps which are the first printed editions and 44 volumes of the first reprint of his works. Authors like Shakespeare, with his first complete editions, as well as almost all the works by Moliére are also present. It also stores first editions of the Bible by Gutenberg, the 95 thesis of Luther or the Principia Mathematica by Newton, to which we must add thousands of documents from Hölderlin, Mozart, Beethoven, Napoleon, Valéry, Borges, and much more.
The most impressive works are the ones named The Bodmer Papyri, which contain fragments from the Old and New Testament. Also, there are cuneiform tablets which are truly fantastic.
From the Middle Ages there are also whole series of first rate medieval manuscripts, and if we move forward a little bit in time, we can find the originals of the 95 thesis by Luther, as well as a copy of the Bible by Gutenberg. From the Renaissance, we also have a portrait of Dante Alighieri done by Botticelli, no less.
For all of those of you who want to check the the library in digital format, there are two projects underway for their digitalization that you can consult on the following websites:
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en
OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (29 de julio de 2025). La gran biblioteca Martin Bodmer. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 14 de abril de 2026 de https://doi.org/10.58079/14g49

