Pessoas-livros: O Arquivo Bibliográfico de Fernando Pessoa

Although Fernando Pessoa’s work mostly exists in the nearly 30,000 pieces of paper that form the archive held by the Portuguese National Library, it is possible to show how this archive is composed by bibliographical materials, which link it to the book as a medium. Against the common idea of Pessoa as someone who didn’t write books and only left individual pieces of paper, this material evidence shows that the poet conceived an idea of the book and of a set of books, which conditioned his way of writing. This article follows the purpose of contextualizing and determining Pessoa’s concerns with the materiality of a medium different than the one which contains the greater part of his work, by analyzing several evidences of this bibliographical dimension of his writing.