On Library Museums

August 30, 2022 timothywstanley@me.com

The most touching piece in the gallery, however, contains no intelligible message at all: a tiny square of paper preserves a young child’s shaky-handed attempt to write the alphabet, its margins given over to a forest of zigzags and doodles where concentration had flagged. I thought of this child when I myself recently began to study Hebrew: a thousand years and thousands of miles removed, we were united in our attempt to yoke unfamiliar letters under mastery. But absent learning a new writing system later in life, it takes artifacts like this one to make legible something that the average adult’s effortless literacy overwrites in the palimpsest of human experience: the relationship to language one had as a child, when reading was still wondrous and difficult and strange, a tussle with an angel you’d yet to get the better of; the days of scrawling letters backward, sideways, on wide-ruled paper and with crayons held with the whole fist. Like a modern genizah, the library museum is a physical manifestation of the preciousness of the written word, a reminder of the love and devotion that thousands of years of human culture have paid to a genre of object that is passing increasingly out of this world. Leaving that exhibition, I thought of the books I had on my shelves, of the book I was carrying for the journey home, of the books that have accompanied me every day of my life. Dog-eared, underlined, water-warped after a sudden rainstorm, with birthday wishes or author signatures or notes for school written in, they spoke as only a physical object could—not just of themselves but also of my own life. Perhaps as reading happens increasingly in a digital form, what we lose is this: the meaningless things that in sum become meaningful, those aspects of a book’s significance that exist beyond words.

Erica Eisen, “Ode to the Library Museum,” - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/24/ode-to-the-library-museum/