What to do with the library at home

In mid-2020, perhaps at the height of the

, a Spanish company had the original idea of ​​offering real-size frames that simulated a library to use as a background in virtual connections.

The fact that the image of books was offered, and not the books themselves, seemed – and still is – the paroxysm of the simulacrum so often denounced since the end of the 20th century.

However, the issue of libraries, as furniture or symbolic construction, is not a new or exclusive topic of criticism of the society of the spectacle.

It could be approached from interior design, when historically it was from

and the

.

Beyond that, there is an area, without a precise name, that combines architecture with autobiography and produces texts made of real materials (wood, bricks, agglomerates), technical (electricity or bytes) and symbolic (words, images and silences). ).

What do we do with our physical libraries today, when they have been duplicated in digital libraries?

This library belonged to the scholar and polyglot Richard Mascksey.

It was falsely attributed to Umberto Eco and went viral as such.

Today many young people order them based on the color of the spines of their books;

This paradox of chaos, given that it is based on the memory of the covers, produces a kind of Pantone but discourages consultation and rereading: they are non-utilitarian, ornamental libraries.

At the end of this "testimonial" decoration, the market offers wallpapers with libraries, in the range that goes from animated shelves, to

, to realistic and even real libraries.

You can have in the living room the famous

, from

, in

, among the most beautiful in the world, and a mural with the supposed library of

.

What happened with it is eloquent of the new sensibility.

In recent years, a photo of the Eco library that was not such, but owned by the professor, bibliomaniac and polyglot

, with 51,000 volumes (not counting magazines), destroyed in 2019, after his death, went viral.

Although the misunderstanding was clarified in an article in

, it continues to serve in zooms and presenting itself as Eco on the web: thus we saw the birth and growth of a legendary image.

Royal libraries have expanded so much that they require the librarianship method.

, a company of Florencia Baranger and Sofía Pomar, catalogs collections of books and art in a systematic and easily accessible online database.

"We are the

of the collections!", they ironically.

Robert Darnton

,

and also

: never have the glorious and infamous chapters of the history of the book been investigated as much as in this century.

A new volume,

(Ediciones Godot), provides short essays and memoirs by

and

, among fourteen other authors, about their personal libraries.

It joins the Ampersand editorial collection, which has been gathering memories of great Argentine authors/readers, such as

and

.

Umberto Eco and his library in Bologna (the real one).

shelter value

In 1957 the French philosopher

published

.

There he pointed out that, just as the house constitutes a protective layer between

and intimate life –like a second skin–, the different environments of that home and the objects arranged could be thought of as organs that guarantee interior life as it happens in the

.

Thus, each corner and each piece of furniture would be in charge of a specific function related to the incorporation and contribution of nutrients, circulation and cleaning of the air, and even waste evacuation, among other needs.

Bachelard's homology worked in several ways.

In the

, in the second half of the 20th century, two phenomena converged: the tendency to withdraw from

and the development of an industry associated with home comfort.

In parallel, the growth of the so-called white industry (refrigerators, washing machines and other household appliances), accompanied by the

of

, contributed to the formation of a cushioned and private environment, disconnected from the great public problems.

But contrary to other authors who, based on this trend – which included communication devices such as radio or television – denounced anomie and narcotization of the senses, for Bachelard this attitude promoted creativity.

From this perspective, the poetics of space proposed a new way of perceiving, and consequently inhabiting, known environments.

By focusing on the darkest corners of the house, on the drawers that are never opened or on a shelf that is difficult to access, he established a curious method of self-knowledge.

Libraries and their (dis)order could be thought of as gears in this organism-machine that, in successive

, would contribute to the personal history of the possessor.

This vital look was opposed, as mentioned above, to a darker one related to withdrawal in the

, disinterest in

, apathy and excessive consumption, which considers the collection of books a mere accumulation without value. .

By the end of the 20th century, the appearance of the Internet in the domestic sphere further enhanced this trend.

Somehow, the fact that people were connected and available contributed to a more evident fragmentation.

ceased to be exclusive activities of paper, pencil and hand.

Screens and keyboards helped create a bubble around the reader/writer.

This delocalization of the reading (and writing) space is related to what was stated by the German philosopher

in the trilogy of essays

, published between 1997 and 2004. There he pointed out that humanity was the result of interaction with its environment, with its respective atmospheres.

The question of our time would be: what kind of space do we inhabit and what kind of

do we surround ourselves with, with what objects and with whom?

The quintessential family library at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire, England, dates to the early 1730s (furniture and fittings were updated in the early 19th century).Credit...Reid Byers, courtesy Lamport Hall Preservation Trust

The third volume of this trilogy uses the image of the foam to describe a type of urban inhabitant, sheltered in his small bubble who lives with many other subjects in the same conditions: isolated, but in full view of others.

As he inhabits smaller and smaller places, he crowds into

—such as transportation, recitals, and sporting events—and then returns to his individual bubble.

This egosphere fosters an egotechnics (the manufacture of furniture and artifacts for exclusive use) which, in turn, is sustained by the proliferation of self-help discourses, focused on the

.

The heyday of this trend could be characterized by what some specialists call

, which is nothing more than the decision to marry himself.

Thus, the photo of a library would be one more contribution to the construction of a self-centered self and offered only as an image to the outside world.

However, more than twenty years into the 21st century, and despite the growth of virtual life, it is clear that the landscape is much more diverse than envisioned at the beginning.

The

they coexist with contrary tendencies because the environments have never lost contact with the outside world and human relations.

So the sloterdijkian question, about current environments, could be characterized as that of a time where objects are much more than merchandise and much less than extensions of the physical body.

In this framework, real libraries, those that accumulate books but also those that are stored on a device or in the cloud, should be thought of as "organic furniture", an artifact that, by occupying a space, becomes the alter ego of whoever he builds it up, and even acquires human attributes: a reversal of Bachelard's poetics adapted to our time.

"We readers are cyborgs, creatures where biology and technology converge," writes

in the aforementioned

.

“The human brain can store about 100 terabytes of memories, experiences and knowledge.

Thanks to the library, the capacity is multiplied exponentially.

Like flowers, which ally with insects or the wind to reproduce, libraries need us to experience movement and fertilization.

They don't live if someone doesn't take them, open them, read them”, continues Carrión.

Far from the old dichotomy of the last century, which divided the waters between

, but not very close to

where technologies would turn against “the human” (if that existed in a pure state), it is about thinking about how to live in hyper-complex environments.

How, somehow, real objects –furniture, books, eyes and arms– are coupled to new technologies but also how comfortable environments are built to measure.

Thus, the cyborg here should not be understood exclusively as an

technologically enriched for its own benefit, but rather as the result of a relationship with a dynamic and changing environment.

Gil Schafer III, a New York City architect, designed a small library in his own Maine vacation home, using oak plywood on the walls for less formality. Photo: Simon Upton

Following the Bachelardian perspective, many interviewees in this book name the piece of furniture as unstable, with little balance, they mention that they keep or give away books out of superstition, that some disappear without a trace or that, on the contrary, they appear in new places.

The magical attribute, from this perspective, is related to the chance of living organisms.

Just as diseases can strike without warning, some physical attributes are inherited through those mysteries of genetics.

In this crossing of levels, the mergers of the libraries of the cohabitants are also presented, according to the writer

, as "a more significant decision than mixing fluids."

The coexistence of two worlds

However, the most disturbing coexistence of our time is that of the analog –the physical book– with the digital.

If libraries are those complex spaces where different materials inhabit, would it be possible to think of a use, a way of going through it that includes both registers in the same glance?

"The Internet did not change my

habit, but rather that of

," Maliandi writes in the anthology

.

"Fewer and fewer books come off the shelf, because the disorder is so disheartening that one consults or rereads them directly in pdf."

Libraries.

AA.VV.

Editorial Godot.

The threat of disorder seems to oppose the lightness of

.

Here, the metaphor of the cloud, which contains enormous

, works as a complement to a much heavier and more corruptible one, and not as its opposite.

Once again, in this original arrangement of space, the dispute is not between new and

, but between the original and the copy, between the authentic and its

.

The danger is, then, not so much in the withdrawal of private places, but rather in the limitless display of a facade without depth.

Perhaps, one should delve into the funds, in those places that seem inaccessible to the superficial gaze.

The

is not

but the still images that can be captured from them.

The frame with the photo of a library should function as a witness and warning of a time in which the biggest problem is not the abandonment of the analog, but the flat image of a world sustained in mere exhibition.

look also

The library after the Internet: the illuminated archive

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