La Corallina’s Little Library

Certo, te lo lascio tutto senza grassetto.

La Corallina’s Little Library

La Corallina was conceived as a project in which the creation of its decorative objects is also a cultural journey: bibliophilia, a love of iconography and philosophy meet and intertwine, transforming each object into a small story made of images, ideas and forms.

From this comes the idea of La Corallina’s own little ideal library, which we will present in several instalments. Today, we begin with five very different books, united by a fascination with everything that escapes easy classification: fantastic animals, imaginary geographies, symbols, metamorphoses and forms that travel across the centuries.

The Physiologus — Anonymous

Adelphi, Piccola Biblioteca Adelphi, 1975

One of the foundational texts from which the medieval tradition of bestiaries would emerge. Real animals and fabulous creatures are described not so much for what they are as for what they signify: the lion, the phoenix and the unicorn become moral, religious and symbolic figures. A world in which nature and imagination have not yet become separate realms.

The Book of Imaginary Beings — Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero

Adelphi, Biblioteca Adelphi, 2006

An encyclopaedia devoted to creatures that do not exist. Borges travels through mythologies, legends, sacred texts and the literature of every age, gathering dragons, sphinxes, basilisks and impossible animals. The result is a universal bestiary in which erudition becomes a form of the fantastic and the fantastic, almost imperceptibly, takes on the authority of truth.

The Goose of Hermogenes — Ithell Colquhoun

Edizioni di Atlantide

A novel, an initiatory journey, a Surrealist dream and an esoteric text: The Goose of Hermogenes deliberately escapes every definition. Colquhoun constructs a universe of metamorphoses, symbols, landscapes and apparitions in which things seem constantly on the verge of becoming something else. A strange book in the best sense of the word: rather than describing a world, it alters its coordinates.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places — Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi

Archinto

An atlas of the nonexistent. Its territories are the cities, islands, kingdoms and continents invented by literature, described with the precision normally reserved for real geography. It is a book that turns reading into travel and suggests a fascinating idea: that cartography may serve not only to represent the world, but also all the worlds we have been able to imagine.

Le Moyen Âge fantastique: Antiquités et exotismes dans l’art gothique — Jurgis Baltrušaitis

Adelphi, gli Adelphi

Monsters, arabesques, hybrid creatures, distortions and images originating in distant worlds move through medieval European art. Baltrušaitis traces the migrations of forms, revealing a Middle Ages far less static than we tend to imagine: open to the East, to cultural cross-fertilisation and to the marvellous. A book about the ceaseless journey of images and their ability to transform as they pass from one culture to another.

Five books, then, but above all five ways of seeing: the bestiary, the encyclopaedia, the dream, the map and the image. La Corallina’s imagination also emerges from this uncertain territory, where reality and invention cease to be perfectly distinguishable.

A small bibliographical note: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places was originally published in 1980; the 2010 Archinto edition is the revised and expanded Italian edition. As for Le Moyen Âge fantastique, the original Adelphi edition appeared in 1973, while the edition in the gli Adelphi series referred to here dates from 1993.