The Spine of a House

The Financial Times has an interesting piece about books as physical artifacts.

From the piece...

Books, like bricks, are a basic element of architecture. I wasn’t quite aware of this until I viewed a couple of properties recently and was struck, and appalled, by the lack of books. No books. Not one. The otherwise impeccable interiors seemed painfully incomplete. Bereft.

At the exact moment that the book would seem to be in the greatest danger in its history, threatened by e-books and a proliferation of disposable gadgets, the book’s very old technology seems at its most attractive – and its most physical. E-readers may be able to convey content but they leave no physical trace. Once the machine is turned off or fails, the knowledge disappears. They are resolutely not a part of the architecture but rather of the increasingly messy landscape of stuff. Libraries and bookstacks have always been a physical and aesthetic manifestation of knowledge, of the world informed by reading and, consequently, a way of reading the inhabitant. There is more information to be gleaned about the occupant of a house from what is on the shelves than from the furniture or the food. Books, or the lack of them, form an almost perfect mirror of concerns and character.

As well as being a means of expression – whether conscious or unconscious – books serve another representational purpose. From the Renaissance and on through the Enlightenment and into a world in which books went from being precious, handmade treasures to affordable commodities, the library or the study lined with books was a cipher for an ordered reality, a defence against a real world outside that could be frighteningly unpredictable. Within their pages lay the answers, the knowledge to fend off an apparent lack of meaning in the universe. Yet, paradoxically, in their disorder, in the random systems we impose (or fail to impose) upon them, they can equally represent the impossibility of knowing. Walter Benjamin, the German thinker, in his beautiful essay “Unpacking my Library”, managed to reconcile these ideas while contemplating his unpacked books in a new apartment: “The chance, the fate that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”

Georges Perec makes a similar point considering his shelves: “We would like to think that order and disorder are, in fact, the same word, denoting pure chance.” The library can also denote the end of time. To find someone’s library in a second-hand bookshop is extraordinarily moving, a document of a life abruptly ended at the moment acquisition stops. But it can be voluntary. There was Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, who built a private library in his submarine, 12,000 uniformly bound volumes submerged with him, the sum of all knowledge up to a point at which, for him, it all stopped, there would be nothing new.