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The Mundaneum

The world’s knowledge, on millions of index cards

The Mundaneum

Two Belgian lawyers set out to gather all human knowledge, classify it, and answer any question anyone posted in. The medium was the index card, and the surviving furniture makes the ambition legible: a wall of small oak drawers under a hand-lettered board reading Répertoire Bibliographique Universel. It is in Mons, it is open, and it is the strangest possible argument that the search box was invented on paper.

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