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Has the library created a matrix generating a new practice of transmittable, reproducible and verifiable knowledge ? How, and through what discontinuities and against what adversaries and competitors did it succeed to inaugurate the new social and political connections increasing the normative plenitude of a new subject of knowledge : the reader ? Do we have reasons for seeing in this reader librarian the undeveloped and archaic harbinger of the voting-citizen ? Was the homo bibliothecus the paradigm for the homo democraticus  ? The answer to these emphatic and present-day questions is elaborated through an examination of the grounding discourse of the modern library, that is the universal and public library : Gabriel Naudé’s L’advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627).