Brian Hamilton

Holding on to Books

This comment stems from Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, an extended exposé on the desperate rhetoric and foolish action of our libraries in the name of ‘preservation.’

If libraries have failed and continue to fail at the work of book conservation, overlooking the book’s value as book in order to maintain its utilitarian value, it will fall to collectors private and institutional to guard these artistic and intellectual treasures. The assault on paper by American libraries demonstrates once again that the artistic and the intellectual cannot finally be separated; the libraries who have desperately destroyed the bindings and paper of the books are also losing the content, while the collectors who have always valued the book in its full form still have both.

I wonder if the situation will regress to the point where readers, scholars, and other book connoisseurs will need to rely on each other rather than libraries to find material? The shift, though a depressing loss in the realm of public cultural collaboration, would at least have the interesting benefit of connecting readers with overlapping interests.

• Connecting readers is worthwhile in any case.
• Here’s an instance where technology could be put in favor of conservation, through the use of social networking software.
• LibraryThing is a prototypical example of the way that technology could facilitate public awareness and possibly access to private holdings.
• Private libraries tend towards depth and specialization in a way that public libraries rarely do.
• But then there’s money, which we have more of collectively than privately.

Thus, of course, the importance of public collections. The case for public libraries is not one that need be made, but we must remind ourselves of the cultural and artistic mandate of libraries rather than reducing their function to information storage.

This seems obvious. But the extreme resistance that Nicholson Baker has provoked proves that our libraries are also children of modernism and industrialization, also slaves to resources, also among those who see the world as a math problem rather than as an organic being or a work of art.

This is what Milbank means, I assume, when he speaks of ‘flattening the world.’

10 August 2006 |
tags: Libraries