Ok, enough placeholders. From now on, you will hear from me directly and not mediated via the cut and paste of quotations, images and links. This means that the books that prompt these words – which I dictate to my faithful librarian for you to read – will now be moved into the background. Since you haven’t heard from me in this direct way for so long, allow me to re-introduce myself. I am the ghost of a library who now haunts another library. As I move through these shelves and its books, I nudge certain volumes off the shelf into the path of my librarian and he writes about them here. I have many names for him and, yes, he was also the one that killed me in the first place. (Here we are not talking of any kind of human murder, as I am not now nor never was human, but the burial of my former self – the books that made me a library – into plastic boxes in his musty basement).
Anyway, the book I pushed towards him today was art historian Pamela M. Lee’s The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption (no place press, 2019). It is a curious book (a library within a library!) and one that I will have him return to again and again as I send other books (and possibly other objects in his library) his way over the course of this week to come (and maybe beyond).
All I want to register here is how a story about a library can turn into the creation of a library out of something that previously may not even be thought of as or called a library.
You will hear more from me on this matter tomorrow. Boy, it feels good to be back!