Unpacking Our Library

Found this in the Strand Stacks

Alberto Manguel — The Library At Night

Breezed through this philosophical musing on the meanings of libraries by Alberto Manguel whilst poolside in Key West. Half way through I realized he is the author of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places that I've owned since third or fourth grade, making it one of the oldest books in my own library!

Virginia Woolf once tried to distinguish between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading and concluded that "there is no connection whatever between the two." "A learned man," she wrote, "is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."

(From 'Hours in a Library' in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume II, 1912–1918.)

And even paper and ink can sometimes survive a death sentence. One of the lost plays of Sophocles is The Loves of Achilles, copies of which must have perished one after another, century after century, destroyed in pillaging and fires or excluded from library catalogues because perhaps the librarian deemed the play of little interest or of poor literary quality. A few words were, however, miraculously preserved. "In the Dark Ages, in Macedonia," Tom Stoppard has one of his characters explain in his play The Invention of Love, "in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son, whose name was Septimus; so we have one sentence from The Loves of Achilles. Love, said Sophocles, feels like the ice held in the hand by children." I trust that book-burner's dreams are haunted by such modest proof of the book's survival.

Books lend a room a particular identity that can in some cases, usurp that of their owner—a peculiarity well known to oafish personalities who demand to be portrayed against the background of a book-lined wall, in the hope that it will grant them some scholarly lustre. Seneca mocked ostentatious readers who relied on such walls to lend them intellectual prestige; he argues for possessing only a small number of books, not "endless bookshelves for the ignorant to decorate their dining-rooms."

Bucket List Item #845: Pet Edward Gorey's Cat

Check.

I went to the Edward Gorey Museum today in his former house and was pleasantly surprised to see how weird it still manages to be, even after having the bulk of his thousands and thousands of books and collections removed. Among other things they had a scavenger hunt for all 26 dead children from the Gashlycrumb Tinies, here is G is for George, smothered under a rug:



I also learned he had a pop-up book called The Dwindling Party published in the 80s that I'm off to get as soon as possible:





Looking at the book covers he made, I mentioned to my mum that there was a great web-comic artist who made comics extrapolated from his work. "Kate Beaton!" said the girl next to us, "I'm friends with her! She just moved to Brooklyn!" Hi Kate! Check them out (click to enlarge):

Bookshelf Porn

"Featuring a book on your bookshelf is akin to displaying a trophy. You’ve accomplished something in reading a book; it feels like a victory. The opportunity to display your literary conquests in unique or unexpected ways is something I will greatly miss with e-readers.”

—The New Yorker’s The Book Bench on Bookshelf Porn

Here are some of my favorites from the BookshelfPorn blog. After having gone through all of them I have to add that I find it really distasteful when people organize their books by color or use novelty shelving (unless it's a hidden door).

Boston Athenaeum

I just killed some time checking out the public galleries at the Athenaeum in Boston. It's one of the oldest and largest private libraries in the country and is gorgeous.



Among all the 18th and 19th century portraiture in their collection I came across this painting, Checkout Time at the Marlborough-Blenheim (1978) by Bradley Phillips. I was describing it to my Grandmother who used to work there and she remembered it well (although in her time it hung in the staff kitchen) and also loved it. She did not, however, ever notice that the subject is in the middle of relighting a roach!



Bonus: Among the the Athenaeum's 500,000+ collection includes a book bound in human skin!

That's Me On the Left

"We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them."

— John Waters

John Waters — Role Models

Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

"But what about love?" you may ask. That terribly exciting disease that, to me, feels like another full-time job...I know that true love is supposed to be companionship, growing old together, blah blah blah. I thought that was what friends were for, not sexual partners! Some of us want hot lunatic porn sex and we want it forever!

I've always said true success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.

Boys...Turn your belt around to the right side so that the buckle is forty-five degrees off center. Nothing is sexier, the secret sign that your gun is loaded, so to speak...Lustful, beautiful juvenile-delinquent boys have been wearing their belts this way for decades of erotic confidence, and I expect you to do the same...Always be dressed in your full cult finest in case you are arrested. There is only one fashion photograph that counts in our world: the perp walk.

John Waters on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

Am I the Only One That Thinks This is Funny?

Keef the Librarian

I was reading a book a few years ago about private libraries called At Home With Books. Among all the other millionaire collectors was Keith Richards, explaining his octagonal library filled with books about Nazis and other such. Asked why he had hardly any books about music, and I'll always remember this, he said something along the lines of "music is for listening to, not for reading about." (That didn't keep me from reading the 33 1/3 about Exile on Main Street.) Then the other day my friend Shelia e-mailed me this from the Times Online:

Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian. After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.

He has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in Sussex and Connecticut . . . The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.” He has opted instead for keeping favoured volumes close to hand and the rest languishing on dusty shelves.

Richards has also acted as a public library, lending out copies of the latest Bernard Cornwell or Len Deighton novels to friends without much hope of getting them back. And, like the Queen at Balmoral, he leaves favoured books by the bedside for guests staying at Redlands, his moated Elizabethan farmhouse near West Wittering in West Sussex and in Weston, Connecticut.

In his autobiography, Life, due to be published in October, Richards will reveal how, as a child growing up in the post-war-austerity of 1950s London, he found refuge in books before he discovered the blues.

He has declared: “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.”

Along the same theme of rocker's libraries I just came across this series of videos of Thurston Moore showing off his collection of rare poetry journals:

Sea Monsters in Space

[This is awesome]

I just finished reading R. Crumb's new illustrated version of Genesis. If you were planning on starting to read the Bible his edition is definitely the way to go. I had read most of Genesis before but this reading taught me something new: God did not create the world.

Here are the first few lines of Genesis:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Because the language obfuscated itself I never took it its meaning until I saw R. Crumb illustrate it:

[Click to enlarge/improve]

What he's saying is that before what Jews and Christians think of as the creation, the earth was already in a sense there but in the form of an endless body of water. God created a pocket of air within that water, holding it back with the firmament (that is until Genesis 7:11 when "the windows of heaven were opened" and the waters were let in to flood the earth). This space constituted all of his creation with the sun and moon and stars floating between the land and firmament. Here is a better illustration:



This understanding of creation is buttressed by one Biblical scholars' more nuanced translation of the Hebrew:

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author . . . claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world—and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals . . . She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara" . . . does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate" . . . [She] said her new analysis showed that the beginning of the Bible was not the beginning of time, but the beginning of a narration. She said: "It meant to say that God did create humans and animals, but not the Earth itself." She writes in her thesis that the new translation fits in with ancient texts. According to them there used to be an enormous body of water in which monsters were living, covered in darkness . . . The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding.

Normally if I'm offered two stories of the same event I'll go with whichever one is more interesting. This story really gives the Black Sea deluge theory a run for it's money in terms of awesomeness. I think I'm having a crisis of atheist faith. I want to know more about these sea monsters! Do they now live past the edge of space? Are they like the Acanti?

Here's a bonus page from Genesis where Lot offers his two virgin daughters to an angry mob to rape rather than the two strangers he took in as guests (the same two daughters who would later get Lot drunk so they could have sex with him to have children. Fun!

[Click to enlarge/improve]

Graphic Design Notebook

I started a bare bones design blog / e-inspiration board / hyperlink tagged and labeled notebook. Send me interesting print design stuff and I'll add it if I like it!

Interior Design

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."

Anna Quindlen / Public & Private, Enough Bookshelves / New York Times

Errata Editions

Just saw these new books at the Strand the other day, a (hopefully) ongoing series of reproductions of famous (and prohibitively expensive) photography books. I'm so happy to be seeing such a well designed package making good art more accessible to people:

From Eugene Atget's Photographe de Paris

From Walker Evans' American Photographs

Strange Maps

I am the 10,000,000th person to come across the blog Strange Maps but I don't care. It is the most consistently fantastic thing I've seen online in a long, long time. It has motivated me to drag from the vaults a collection of maps I've been meaning to post on here forever. While researching a conceptual encyclopedia I made for my college senior thesis I found a wonderful old book deep in the library stacks called Unrolling the Map: The Story of Exploration by Leonard Outhwaite (1935) that I think beautifully illustrates the discovery of the world from an unashamedly Eurocentric point of view. For some reason you weren't allowed to check it out so I had to sneak a scanner into the library and covertly gather these images, coughing heavily to hide the noise. I've tried to pair them with maps detailing the same period in world history as close as I could using the book Atlas of World History by John Haywood (1997):

1800 AD — Exploration

1812 AD — Cultures

1550 AD — Exploration

1530 AD — Cultures

1490 AD — Exploration

1492 AD — Cultures

700–1300 AD — Exploration

1279 AD — Cultures

1000 AD — Exploration

1000 AD — Cultures

800 AD — Exploration

800 AD — Cultures

3000 BC — Exploration

2000 BC — Cultures

I like to imagine how mind blowing it would be to live in Europe 2000 years ago and be handed an accurate map of the world and all the people in it, or to be transported from Medieval Europe to the advanced Aztec or Mayan capitols, or Japan, or to Polynesia. It would be akin to being handed a map of the night sky with all the inhabited planets pointed out on it. Kind of like this: