Encyclopédie by Diderot e d’Alembert

An extraordinary atlas of artisan techniques that humanity had accumulated and perfected over the centuries, the Encyclopédie is one of the publishing company’s most valuable ventures. Its reprint spanned an entire decade – the 1970s – and restored the deserved notoriety to the illustrated plates, which Barthes likened to a sort of 18th-century Expo: a census (which is also a show) of the countless marvellous things that people are capable of doing with their hands. Additionally, contributions from Barthes himself and from Borges, who wrote the prologue for the last volume (intended to collect influential essays, writings and interventions on the Encyclopédie and the Enlightenment era) join those by other scholars who collaborated on the work. This creates an updated and exquisite framework for one of the fundamental texts in the history of humanity.