Making Books Work

Books Are Important Because of the things that are done with them. These practices are important in turn because of the way they fit into the wider world. And so books are powerful because of the contexts within which they’re used. Contexts can be cultural but they can also be physical. Libraries are built contexts in which books are put to work.

Libraries can facilitate reading but books can also be used without being read. In Buddhist temples in China and Japan texts might be stored in a revolving sutra case. These are large structures, housed within an even larger building, in which an entire corpus of canonical texts is housed. The sutra case sits on an axle allowing the whole thing to be revolved by a single person pushing it round by its handles. Completing one revolution was held to confer the same merit as reading through the entire canon. The design of a sutra case makes it very difficult to access the books stored in it. They are a form of library which deliberately makes it difficult to retrieve and read books in order to make another way of using them possible. In this context, books can work by being moved through space.

Sometimes books can be put to work just by being there. When the library at the Escorial was built in the late sixteenth century an innovative decision was made to line the library with open shelves and have the books on display. Having them seen was a way of using them. It was impressive. Like the Escorial as a whole, it embodied and fashioned the Spanish Crown’s myth of itself. Samuel Pepys did something similar with his own more modest library which he had handsomely bound and housed in glass-fronted cases. He had his books write his own myth of middling prosperity. An academic’s study might not be so different. Books can manifest power, wealth, and expertise. They project biographies. They don’t actually need to be read to do this.

Putting lots of books together changes the way they work. If you walk into a building and see a book, you see a book. But if you walk into a building and see several thousand books housed together in a single space, then you see something else. Books have some strange properties, such as the fact then when you put lots of them together new powers are activated. But only if they’re seen or used. Like the weirdness of quantum phenomena, observation transforms the nature of what you’re observing.

Even weirder, what the observer thinks they see can be more important than what’s actually there. The monastic library at Altenburg in Austria is a rococo monstrosity on an incredible scale. It is easily the equal of the library at Melk which was built to house a large and important collection. The only difference is that the monks at Altenburg didn’t really have many books. The size of the library is wildly out of proportion to the size of the collection. But it is an admirably efficient building. At a glance, it transforms a modest group of books into a stunning ensemble at the heart of an intellectually and culturally ambitious institution. A well-designed library has a multiplier effect. It doesn’t just facilitate access to a pile of books. It changes that pile into something better.

At least the monastery at Altenburg did actually own some books. Where books were stored out of sight in cupboards, as may have been the case in ancient libraries, then it was possible to build an impressive library that contained no books at all. Walking into a library like that of Celsus at Ephesus (now in Turkey), a visitor would have found himself in an opulent space, high-ceilinged and marble-clad, lined with closed cupboards set in niches. There was simply no way of knowing what was in them, but the magnificence of...