Hannah Arendt's Library

2012

Edition: 250
376 pages / 174 color images
Handmade clothbound clamshell boxes
with black letterpress on spine

Hannah Arendt’s Library is an artist book by Heinz Peter Knes, Danh Vo, and Amy Zion. The project centers on the ‘Arendt Ephemera Collection’ housed in Special Collections at Stevenson Library, Bard
College, NY, in which various materials that were found inside Arendt’s books are catalogued. Since the library came to Bard in the late 1970s, each book containing “bookmarks” was given its own folder, and as the system became more sophisticated, the pages between which the items were found was also noted in the folder. The material ranges from an invoice for shoe repairs to several matchbook
covers to an unpublished manuscript by a quantum physicist. More importantly, the material traces Arendt’s life as she is forced to leave Germany for France and land in the US as a refugee; it continued
to accumulate as she traveled around Europe later as a tourist and around the US as a teacher and intellectual. The back of each image contains an entry from the collection’s finding aid, listing information
about the folder in which it was found.