The World’s Knowledge

THE WORLD’S
KNOWLEDGE

As long as knowledge is not written down, it is destined to be forgotten. To avoid this, man preserves knowledge as a vital commodity, also in the PANEUM.

The Showpiece
and the Plague

The second-oldest baking book in the world, which belonged to the Brotherhood of Bakers of Padua, is a book about bread, and therefore life. But it also tells a story of death. The baking brothers wrote about their work from 1461 until the records end in 1630. What remains are empty pages hinting at the plague, the Black Death, which took the lives of two-thirds of the inhabitants of Padua, including bakers.

Thousands of different works relating to the cultivation of grain, its nutritive value, milling, bakery and confectionery can be found in the PANEUM, making it one of the most comprehensive libraries on bread and grains in the world.

The showpiece of the PANEUM library is a book from the Brotherhood of Bakers of Padua, the second-oldest baking book in the world. At some point, the book somehow made its way to the USA and was acquired by an antiquarian in New York, where it caught Peter Augendopler’s eye at the beginning of September 2001. Two days after his departure from New York, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed in the immediate vicinity of the antique shop. Augendopler tried to contact the dealer for many days, until he finally answered the telephone. “I said: ‘Thank God you’re alive!’ He said: ‘Don’t worry, I have been evacuated and the book, the esoteric one, is safe.’”