A tower at the Louvre, many moves and a new name in the Revolution.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France traces its origin to a royal collection. English Wikipedia says the library began with the king’s library founded at the Louvre Palace by Charles V in 1368, after he moved manuscripts received from his predecessor, John II, from the Palais de la Cité. French Wikipedia places the collection in the Louvre’s tour de la Fauconnerie and says an inventory was drawn up in 1373 by Gilles Mallet, the king’s librarian. That library did not survive: Wikipedia says what remained was bought by the English regent, the Duke of Bedford, in 1424 and taken to England.

The collection that followed moved with the court. French Wikipedia says the library gained continuity from the reign of Louis XI and was later joined to the library that Francis I had founded at Fontainebleau. It says Francis I also instituted legal deposit, the rule that copies of printed works must be lodged with the library, through the ordinance of Montpellier of 28 December 1537. Back in Paris the books changed address several times, reaching two houses on the rue Vivienne in 1666 under Louis XIV’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, English Wikipedia says. The library opened to the public in 1692.

The address that became its home came in the eighteenth century. French Wikipedia says the abbé Jean-Paul Bignon obtained in 1720 a move into part of Cardinal Mazarin’s former palace on the rue de Richelieu, where he organised the library into five departments, the origin of today’s Richelieu site. With the Revolution, English Wikipedia says, the king’s library was declared national property and renamed the Bibliothèque Nationale; French Wikipedia says the name then changed between national, imperial and royal with each regime until it settled in 1870.

The buildings on the rue de Richelieu took their present form in two campaigns. Wikipedia says the library expanded in 1868 into buildings by Henri Labrouste, including his reading room, and that after Labrouste’s death in 1875 the architect Jean-Louis Pascal continued the work with the grand staircase and the Oval Room. French Wikipedia says the Salle Ovale was inaugurated in 1936, completed by Alfred Recoura.

A 1988 announcement, a 1994 decree and four towers on the Seine.

The present institution was created by merger. On 14 July 1988, Wikipedia says, President François Mitterrand announced a new library intended to cover all fields of knowledge, be open to all and be consultable at a distance. A public body for the Bibliothèque de France was set up to build it, with the journalist and writer Dominique Jamet as its president, according to French Wikipedia. The BnF’s own authority record says a decree of 3 January 1994 confirmed the merger of the Bibliothèque nationale and that public body, creating the Bibliothèque nationale de France as a public administrative establishment under the Ministry of Culture; the same record dates the end of the old Bibliothèque nationale to the day before. French Wikipedia says that during its building the project was often called the “Très Grande Bibliothèque”, or TGB, a name still in informal use until at least 1999.

The architect came through competition. Wikipedia says the firm of Dominique Perrault was retained in July 1989 after an international ideas competition, on a site in the new Tolbiac district of the 13th arrondissement where a glassworks had stood, and that the construction was carried out by Bouygues. French Wikipedia describes four corner towers, each 79 metres high, that symbolise four open books, and gives them names: the towers of Time, Laws, Numbers and Letters. Between them lies a sunken garden of pines brought from the forest of Bord-Louviers, which French Wikipedia says evokes a medieval cloister and is closed to the public.

The dates of the opening are given in stages. French Wikipedia says Mitterrand inaugurated the library under its new name on 30 March 1995, that it opened to the public on 20 December 1996, and that researchers were received in the Rez-de-jardin from 8 October 1998, after the bulk of the collections had moved from the rue de Richelieu. English Wikipedia gives the inauguration as 15 December 1996. The official name, site François-Mitterrand, was given at the request of President Jacques Chirac, French Wikipedia says. The library’s digital service, Gallica, was established in October 1997, according to English Wikipedia.

The Richelieu site was then rebuilt in phases. French Wikipedia says the architect Bruno Gaudin was commissioned in 2007, and English Wikipedia credits the design to Gaudin and Virginie Brégal. Works ran from 2010 to 2022, and the site, renamed Richelieu – Bibliothèques, musée, galeries, now also houses the libraries of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, in the Labrouste room, and of the École nationale des chartes.

A brace for classification and a system meant to flex.

For a library, visual identity begins long before a logo. The library card is often the object a member carries every day, and its design sets the tone for every later contact, from the issue desk to the self-service kiosk. Inside the building, signage and wayfinding do much of the identity work: floor directories, shelf-end labels, room names and pictograms have to be legible at a glance, in several languages where needed, and consistent across reading rooms, stacks and children’s areas. Shelf classification is itself a visual system. Call numbers, subject bands and colour-coded spine labels turn an abstract scheme of knowledge into marks that readers learn to scan, and a well-ordered shelf can say as much about an institution as its letterhead.

The building often acts as the symbol. Many libraries are known by a facade, a reading room or a stair, and their graphics are built to sit alongside that architecture rather than compete with it, with restrained palettes and typefaces chosen for long texts and small sizes. The digital side now carries equal weight: the online catalogue, the app, the e-lending platform and the digitised collections need the same names, icons and tone as the signs in the hall, so that a search on a phone and a visit in person feel like one service. For library systems with many branches, identity becomes a framework, one shared name and set of rules that lets each local building keep its own character while remaining recognisably part of the network.

An oval room opened to everyone and a mark chosen in 1994.

The reopening of Richelieu changed how the old site meets the public. Time Out Paris, in an article dated 1 September 2022, reported that the site had fully reopened on 17 September 2022 after a complete architectural overhaul by the office of Bruno Gaudin. The magazine said visitors could also enter from the rue Vivienne through a new garden planted with species used to make paper, and that the Salle Ovale, 18 metres high beneath a glass roof, was no longer reserved for researchers but open to all, with chairs designed by Patrick Jouin. It described a new museum succeeding the old museum of coins, medals and antiquities, in restored rooms including the galerie Mazarin, with displays renewed three times a year around an annual theme.

The BnF’s graphic identity dates from the year of the merger. The library says that in 1994 the art director Jean Widmer and his partner Gérard Plénacoste won the tender to design the logo of the new Bibliothèque nationale de France. It says the accolade, the curly brace, was chosen because it is the emblem of classification, and that the sign is still present today as a strong element of the BnF’s identification. The library adds that Widmer refused to impose an overly rigid graphic charter and preferred a flexible system that could be adapted, an approach it says remains at the heart of its visual communication.

For a design guide, the Bibliothèque nationale de France shows an identity spread across centuries of addresses: a royal library at the Louvre, a nineteenth-century reading room on the rue de Richelieu, four towers named after branches of knowledge and a brace that stands for ordering. Compare the British Library and Library of Congress guides. For this guide we use vellum, esplanade oak, tower glass and reading-room ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bibliothèque nationale de France’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.