Editions Take5 by Charles Mela (former Director, Fondation Martin Bodmer)

Kairos

A happy encounter, what the Greeks call kairos, sometimes decides the fate of a fine undertaking. What do a publisher of contemporary artists’ books, the name it chose for itself in 2006, a library containing the most memorable texts of human history which opened its museum in 2004, and a professional medievalist who was its director at the time have in common? A shared moment spent marvelling at a first book whose name evoked “shards of pink glass”, the twists and turns of a fledgling friendship, a passion for art and beauty and the desire to make room in an already prestigious collection for contemporary creations displaying an utterly new way of combining the arts. But the “star” that steers us also reminds us that a number is never random. And the number in this case is 5. Readers of Emile Mâle’s Art and Artists of the Middle Ages, so dear to Marcel Proust, are familiar with the value of the number 5 in the story of the wise and foolish virgins, whose meaning is divulged by the Glossa Ordinaria and symbolises the carnal and spiritual joys of the five senses. Equally, it was in the circle formed by the five extremities of the human body that the “Vitruvian Man” was represented, such that the number 5 has become specifically identified with man. Even more mysterious is the “pentangle”, the star with five branches figured on Sir Gawain’s shield in the story The Green Knight—one of the very first great works of English literature. It signified the basic elements used in alchemic transmutation, and gives its rhythm, in turn, to the multiple fives in Michel Butor’s Passing Time. From this extraction—or abstraction—we have since Rabelais the venerable word “quintessence”. However, the name chosen by the editor of les editions Take5 to suggest, among other things, that we take five minutes’ time out to read and to discover, was taken from the 1959 title of the greatest hit by the jazzman Dave Brubeck, and refers to its unusual 5/4 rhythm. To close the circle, all that remained to do was to re-read the words spoken by Martin Bodmer in 1967 in the Salle des abeilles of the Athénée theatre, when he presented his Bibliotheca Bodmeriana. He built his collection around the mystical number 5, and around the five pillars that represent the greatest accomplishment of the creative human spirit: Homer, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, which he called his “poetic pentagon”. In it he sensed a principle of harmony in the world, ordered around the five powers of history, belief, the word, art and knowledge, as well as the five periods of human history and the five civilisations of writing. Which gets us back to the youngest child of les éditions Take5, the book of books, Recto Verso, and the “homage to Babel” that Borges’ friend Alberto Maguel devotes in it to Weltliteratur. Charles Méla