Taking Back Sunday - A Decade Under The Influence

One of them was the sixty-year-old Baron Gottfried van Sviten, the son of the personal doctor of Empress Maria Theresa, a former successful diplomat, and from 1777 to 1791, the court librarian. The title of this post, which van Sviten inherited from his father, may seem modest, but you need to imagine what the Vienna Imperial Library is. Her building, located in the Hofburg palace complex, included a huge front reading room, similar in size and decoration to the temple, countless bookcases and shelves with books of different centuries, collections of all kinds of rarities - maps, prints, globes, statues ... so as not to get lost in the entrusted to him treasures, van Sviten came up with what librarians around the world still use: the card catalog (instead of bulky and stupid ledgers).