Belgium has many strange collections, but the Mundaneum is maybe the oddest. Located in an abandoned department store in the southern Belgian town of Mons, it contains a vast collection of newspapers, index cards, posters, tickets, catalogues and curiosities of all sorts.
The collection was begun in the early twentieth century by the idealists Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, who aimed to gather together all the world’s knowledge in a single collection.
As well as filling several buildings with anything he could find, Otlet invented the library index card to impose order and tried to develop a special telescope so people could access documents remotely.
The project ran into financial problems in the 1930s and the vast collection of documents ended up dumped in a Brussels underground car park. It was almost destroyed, but in 1998 the flamboyant Mons mayor Elio di Rupo stepped in to save the collection.
It was rehoused in an old department store and, with funding from Google, rebranded as the world’s first internet.
