The Itinerary of the Book is a project initiated by the Council of Europe’s Directorate for Education, Culture and Sport to explore the feasibility to develop this as a project in the context of the Council’s Cultural Route Programme. After several exploratory meetings it was decided that the Consortium of European Research Libraries would undertake to develop a proposal for this project together with the Ecole Nationale des Sciences d’Information et des Bibliothèques (ENSSIB) in Lyon.
The Cultural route programme seeks to improve access to areas of European culture where interest is shared by a number of European countries. ‘The book’ is therefore an eminently suitable theme which can be made accessible to a larger public - including a young public - through education, exhibitions, publication in a variety of forms and cultural tourism. An essential part of the project is to seek the support of experts in these specialist and often isolated areas of expertise in order to guarantee the quality of the information which is given wider dissemination. To this end the project has from the beginning sought to involve a large spectrum of institutions addressing the history of the book: libraries, museums, and academic departments, as well as regional authorities who are to support cultural tourism.
A proposal, here presented as submitted to the Directorate, and now accepted for implementation over a period of years, sets out the planning.