National Library treasures memory – Latest News

A manual of exorcisms from 1783, which no one dares to touch out of mere superstition; the first Bible in Spanish that dates back to 1569 and was minted in the Gutenberg printing press itself; the smallest book in the world, with the Lord’s Prayer in seven languages ​​that can only be read with a magnifying glass; a cuneiform stone almost 5 thousand years old donated by Arturo Úslar Pietri; the first book printed in Venezuela, from 1810, with the printing press that Miranda brought; the second edition of Don Quixote of 1617; These are just some of the incunabula wonders that the immense infrastructure anchored in the Foro Libertador, at the end of Avenida Panteón, north of the Altagracia parish, protects among its spectral hiding places.

The National Library, an institution that for 191 years, since its founding and first settlement in the building of the old convent of San Francisco, has had the need to drag its incunabula texts and the ectoplasms from its basements like a bundle wrapped in cellophane, resisting the battles of modernity to that technological labyrinth called the Internet.

Its history is said to be related to the ideas of freedom, identity and sovereignty of the country.

In 1810, a loose leaflet attributed to one of the promoters of independence, the hero Juan Germán Roscio, began to be disseminated in Caracas, where the idea of ​​creating a library that would have as its object the propagation of the ideas of the Enlightenment was expressed. . Simón Bolívar, on June 4, 1814, gave instructions for the formation of a public library in Caracas, an initiative that suffered the misfortunes of the War of Independence. On July 13, 1833, during the government of José Antonio Páez, the decree creating the National Library was finally promulgated. Therefore, it is the oldest cultural institution in the country and today has national reach under the figure of the Autonomous Institute of the National Library and Library Services of Venezuela. In short, it is the reservoir of the most extensive and plural documentary memory in the country.

Documentary kaleidoscope

• 80 thousand square meters is the total size of the immense infrastructure of the Liberator Forum.
• Among its innumerable rooms are those of the Automated Catalog, Orientation and Reference, the Center for Library Documentation and Information, the General Bibliographic Collection, the Newspaper Collection, the Official Publications Collection, the Old Documentary Collection (rare books), the Arcaya Collection, the Sound Collection and Cinema (Audiovisual Archive) and Collection of Flat Works.
• Memories of Time Project is an initiative that collects the voice of the current protagonists of living history, a unique archive of image and word based on the testimony of the most influential public figures.