Every library is circular

Warburg imagined it, a
library was above all an accumulation of associations, each association breeding a new image or text to be associated, until the associations returned the reader to the
first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.

Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading
room (which he called die kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek
Warburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to
the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of
the Muses.

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel