"A highly original study of book collectors in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain . . . The Librarian's Atlas offers an original perspective on the Spanish Golden Age and shows how our passion for exploring both sides of the horizon is accompanied by another, equally strong--that of mapping out our explorations and lending order to our curiosity." 

Times Literary Supplement

"Libraries were all the rage in Renaissance Europe . . . [and] libraries still provide adventures, and of more kinds than ever. Kimmel eloquently evokes the European and American collections where he recreated the ways of early librarians, guided by their modern counterparts."

London Review of Books

"An engaging and well-documented book, rich in analysis, that delves into a crucial aspect of the formation of early modern states: the collection of knowledge in a library that reflects the territorial wealth of the monarchy. Beautifully and ingeniously crafted, this book discusses a diverse gallery of figures (intellectuals, artists, travelers, and kings) with projects that interact with each other around the passion for books as
repositories of both knowledge and power."

Renaissance Quarterly

"Kimmel offers a different and stimulating perspective of early modern libraries as spaces of lively bibliographic and editorial activity. In this book, libraries are not static repositories of knowledge for individual learning pursuits, but rather evolving loci that gather intellectual communities, nurture cultural and linguistic exchanges, and develop novel forms of collection and conservation. Libraries are, in one of the book’s boldest claims, spaces that shape how the Spanish Empire perceives, constructs, and approaches the world."

Modern Philology

"Scholars interested in material culture and knowledge will find The Librarian’s Atlas a valuable resource for their own research."

Libraries: Culture, History, and Society

“The Librarian’s Atlas is an early modern booklover’s dream. It invites the reader to peer over the shoulder of the creative act of world-making that took place in early modern Spanish libraries. As Kimmel masterfully shows, these libraries were not passive book repositories but vibrant and intellectually stimulating sites of knowledge creation. Their contents and organization were also political projects essential to the formation of a modern understanding of the world."

María M. Portuondo, Johns Hopkins University

“If every book is a world in itself, then a library is a collection of worlds that invites practices of mastery to keep readers afloat in an ocean of paper. Librarians, scholars, translators, and booksellers must define coordinates and draw maps to organize such an atlas. Focusing on the Escorial’s foundation in San Lorenzo and unfolding metaphors around the concept of the bibliotheca, Kimmel offers a fascinating archaeology of intellectual technologies in early modern Europe.”

Christian Jacob, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)

“Kimmel’s brilliant book recovers nothing less than the relationship between the library and the world at a time of unprecedented intellectual and political ambition. They came together, above all, in the complex called the Escorial, created by King Philip II and his successors outside Madrid, and Kimmel offers our richest account to date of its origins, evolutions, and afterlives.”

Bill Sherman, Warburg Institute