There are innumerous books about libraries as well as books that behave like libraries in their anthologizing ambitions. But just as no man is an island, no library is a book. We all know men who would beg to differ, although that’s what makes men men (their relentless mansplaining in begging to differ!). Take my man, my librarian, for example. He’s been trying for many years to make a pitch for the Whitechapel Gallery series Documents of Contemporary Art. He’s suggested THE CLASSICAL, MASKS, FICTION, CANON, CURRICULUM, DECOLONIALITY and each time he’s been rejected (although in the case of the topic of FICTION it seems there is a commission already in the wings there). So when he saw this image on his Instagram feed, and his current focus on libraries (“Unlearning Libraries” to be precise), you can imagine how crest fallen he must have felt. “This could have been me,” I imagine him muttering to himself and doing one of his appropriate Mr. Feddle-esque interventions using his trusted Paint tool.
It was only on closer inspection (note: the above altered image is at its base a cropped version of the original, which you can see here) that he realized that this was not a new book in the series (as his fantasy image above testifies, he was thinking of the recent TRANSLATION book, edited by Sophie J. Williamson, with Yinka Shonibare’s The British Library on its cover) , but the poster for an exhibition of all of the books in the series at the Leeds University Vernon Street Library. Instead of feeling relief, and rushing to his email to send yet another idea to the commissioning editor (although in writing this post, perhaps he is secretly hoping it could act as a pitch, if seen by the right people, with a well-positioned tag and hashtag), he sat down opposite my shelving haunt (remember: I am the ghost of a library who now haunts a living library) and took a long hard look in the mirror of spines across from him. Not only did it become resoundingly clear to him that this moment of misrecognition highlighted his own patriarchal and colonializing ambitions as played out in the form of the Documents of Contemporary Arts series, in his desire to be part of their work and their anthologizing ambitions, but he also realized that there was no way that the idea of the library that he was beginning to understand from the decolonizing work of Indigenous artists could be engaged, let along contained, within the pages of a single book.
So, you’ve heard it here first, there will be no book to come for this sequence of posts. Our Library of the Future will remain this ghost’s story to tell. And if my librarian does end up writing a book, at its beating heart will be this fundamental failure whispered here, echoing back to its readers through its wind-turned pages: no man’s library book is an island, especially not of that original colonizing British Isles variety (cf. Shonibare’s British and American Library projects).