Young Fund

In a civilization in which it is complaining that no one learns poems by heart anymore, and this faculty of ours seems to weaken until the collective loss of historical memory, it is difficult to explain some instrument of civilization has been the art of memory.

It begins in remote times, when orators and teachers did not have at their disposal, I won't say our current recording instruments, but not even the printed book, the manuscripts were voluminous and expensive, the tablets either insufficient or untransportable. Therefore, all that remained was to rely on the ability to memorize an enormous amount of data (names, lists of concepts, topics) and to help the memory, precisely, with special techniques.

From classical antiquity (Aristotle, the pseudo Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero himself) gradually along the Middle Ages and for the following centuries they develop so various artes memoriae, giving life to a series of manuals whose history told us (and these works I refer) Paolo Rossi in his pioneering Clavis universalis (Milan, Ricciardi 1960 – now Bologna, Mulino, 1983) and in 1966 Frances Yates in her The art of memory (Turin, Einaudi, 1972).

Johannes Spangerberg in his Libellus Artificiosae Memoriae (naturally present in this catalogue) recalled that it is forgotten due to corruption, diminution (old age and disease) and ablation of cerebral organs. Now mnemonics could not obviate diminution and ablation, but they could offer precepts to compensate for corruption, or "forgetfulness of past species".

In general, a mnemonic suggested drawing in one's mind any spatial structure (palace, city, territory) that would allow one to discriminate between different divisions and sectors. These sectors (streets, squares, corridors, rooms, stairways) were the "places" where easy-to-memorize images were placed (for example known objects, or on the contrary surprising things, creatures or events, such as statues that represented terrible and monstrous, such that they cannot be easily forgotten). At this point it was a question of assigning to each of these figures the names or concepts that one wanted to memorize (for example the image of a scythe must refer to the problems of agriculture, or the image of a donkey, an elephant and a Rhinoceros must have remembered the air, AER).

Exposed thus, the technique does not account for the heritage of bizarre architectures, dreamlike landscapes, bewildered images with which the tradition of the arts of memory has populated page after page first of verbal fantasies, then of illuminated images and finally, after the invention of printing , of surreal engravings. So that, when by now the existence of the book could allow less tiring ways of storing knowledge (but by now knowing how to remember had become an intellectual point of view for the man of culture), between the Renaissance and the Baroque, mnemonics, from pure remembrance devices, became representations of universal knowledge, virtual encyclopaedias or "theatres of the world" (this happens, for example, with Giulio Camillo Delminio's project for a Theater of Memory, and with Giordano Bruno). In such developments both the apparatus of images that help to remember and the remembered content and the correlation between the two constitute a representation of the universe. Thus mnemonics become an instrument of a vision of the world that investigates the mysterious relationships of sympathy and similarity that exist between earthly and heavenly things, between visible and invisible worlds, they merge into hermetic and kabbalistic knowledge, in part they lose their practical function but acquire a metaphysical, religious and philosophical value - and since the Renaissance le artes memoriaeno longer present themselves as a simple practical tool but as a collection of knowledge, image would, and start from the principle that the world itself is a divine writing and that the mnemonic devices do nothing but reproduce the original cosmic "writing".

If this point is not understood, it will be difficult to accept the idea that these instruction systems really made it possible to remember something, and did not rather confuse the mind by flashing a tangle of symbols and a labyrinth of analogies - and already in the Renaissance Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa complained that such universal representations could lead the mnemotechnician to the brink of madness. But these treatises no longer aimed to compensate for memory defects, but to push the imagination towards new (or very ancient) horizons of knowledge. Or, as happens with Comenius, to give birth to new educational techniques.

This is to say what is the meaning of so many of these pamphlets, often with humble appearance, and their value for cultural historians (or of cultural oddities when, approaching our times, they become pure testimony of an ideal that dies hard ).

That there was a memory enthusiast, collectors of ancient books and interested scholars knew it since 1961, when Morris N. Young appeared a Bibliography of memory (Philadelphia-New York, Clinton Company): 430 pages of bibliographic references, which not only considered the tradition of mnemonics but an immense quantity of works on memory, also from a psychological, neurological, pedagogical, cybernetic point of view. From the inside cover, we learned that Dr. Young, an ophthalmologist, had also assembled the largest private collection of miscellaneous works and documents on memory in the world.

It was only towards the end of the XNUMXs that it was learned in the antiquarian circles that Morris Young had decided to sell his collection. Since there were thoughts of setting up some specialized fund alongside the Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies of the newly founded University of San Marino, during a trip to New York I had visited Dr. Young, who was as hospitable, enthusiastic and amiable as his wife Chesley. And I had walked through rooms inhabited by ancient volumes, modern works, magazines, documents of various types, and even so-called "memorabilia", i.e. gift items, gadgets, games, conjuring devices, memorabilia of all kinds, which in any way were linked to memory, and to the act of remembering. I had also learned that Morris and Chesley Young had assembled several collections in their lives, which they gradually left in other hands when they realized that the work was, so to speak, complete, that is, that on that subject they had collected everything there was. was to be collected. But the "Morris N. Young and Chesley V. Young Library of Memory and Mnemonics" was the work to which the couple had dedicated about forty years of their lives, and to which they were most fond. Except that they had reached the point that their apartment on Fifth Avenue, a stone's throw from Washington Square, and another apartment-warehouse were no longer sufficient to contain (and therefore to classify in an orderly manner and make available to scholars and enthusiasts) the their treasures. In the Fifth Avenue living room one could browse the finer works, but the bulk of the collection made the other apartment look like Borges's Library of Babel.

Hence the beginning of a negotiation. At first I had their latest catalog evaluated by one of the most famous American antiquarian booksellers, Kraus, then contacts began between the Library of the University of San Marino and an English antiquarian bookseller, Robin Halwas, to whom Dr. Young had entrusted the task of finding a prestigious buyer for the collection, who could guarantee its conservation and public availability.

From that moment I have not followed the negotiations which began in 1988 and ended in 1991. The collection contains a medieval manuscript and some later manuscripts, 197 books published before 1800 (including 11 incunabula), about 2000 monographs rear, 2000 articles, 500 pieces of graphics and memorabilia, correspondence with memory scholars and almost 12.000 bibliographic files on the subject. Since it arrived on the slopes of Mount Titano, it took some time to house it in a dignified manner, and finally control and filing was entrusted to another expert in ancient books, Paolo Pampaloni (if there is still a rare mnemonics, one can be sure that sooner or later it will pass through his hands), while the work of restoring some unsafe bindings has begun, in particular to better safeguard the works of greatest interest to bibliophiles.

The catalog that follows is the result of a rigorous collation of all the book material prior to 1800. The works cataloged here, and all relating to the arts of memory, constitute the rarest part of the Fund, certainly the richest mnemonic collection existing in Europe ( some argue that its only competitor is Yale University's Beinecke Library, but that's a matter of debate, and only as far as the pre-nineteenth-century part is concerned).

I present this catalog with satisfaction, not so much as the initiator of the story (since it was an almost casual contribution), but rather as a lover of ancient books and a scholar of semiotics. In this double capacity, I can only formulate one wish, or rather two: that the Fund will be visited by scholars of the subject, who could not find such a complete collection elsewhere, and that it may be enriched over time. The universe of mnemotechnical treatises, long neglected, is so mysterious that it still reserves some surprises. Perhaps some art of memory still needs to be rescued from oblivion.