Some of the ‘library pictures’ of the French artist Erik Desmazieres. A new edition of Desmazieres‘s three-volume catalogue raisonne will be published by the Fitch-Febvrel Gallery later in 2011. The last few copies of the original three-volume set are available at Warnock Fine Arts.

Borges’ The Library of Babel: The Salon of the Planets (1998)

Borges’ The Library of Babel: Upper Circular Gallery (1998)

La Librairie Paul Jammes (2000)

And a picture that appears to exemplify the influences on Desmazieres, Boullee’s Project for a Royal Library (1785)…

I’d also surmise that he may have been led to such work by having grown up reading French graphic novels such as Les Cites Obscures (1983, partly expanded as a ‘director’s cut’ in the mid 2000s, and partly published in English in 2004)…