Leiden 430 Poster Series

These posters were part of the Leiden 430 project. Executed together with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type Media department of the Academy. Commemorating 430 years of the University Library, this project illustrates the roughly 2 million books in the collection. Conceived by Jan Willem Stas and shared design and engineering, the series of 11 posters contain representations of each single book in the collection. The lines of books become the shelves on which the index of the library was stored. Finally the posters were presented on the exact location that contained the actual index, many years ago.

In many cases the electronic index of the library contains references to the actual size of the books. Each year is marked as well as the continent the book originated from. The series then becomes a huge display of history of publishing, first showing the expansion of European printing and later the rise

The panels in the cases which used to hold the index cards for the library.