We have moved again. Moving house has meant, again, coming to terms with my own mortality and sense of identity. Moving house has meant, mostly, moving books, and records, and papers, and trinkets of all sorts. These objects have had their own lives, and unavoidably when I look at them they look back at me. They also look into me.
While packing, moving and unpacking box after box of books, it’s impossible for me not think of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, ‘Unpacking My Library’ [PDF]. I find it astonishing it was originally published in 1931; that’s 90 years ago. It still speaks to me, it knows me and looks into me.
I’ve been unpacking book after book. It has taken a long time. I have not only been thinking and reminscing about nearly each item, but taking photos of them, sharing them, finding postcards and bookmarks and pressed flowers between the pages. I have agonised over whether they still “spark joy” or not, only to immediately reject the notion that keeping books should only be about joy to deserve a place in one’s limited and finite space and life. I’ve also been thinking, in an unavoidable cliché, of Benjamin’s 90-year-old essay.
It interests me that when I think of that essay I do not immediately think of the book (the physical edition) in which I first read it. This does not mean I have forgotten that fact- I read it in the Harry Zohn translation included in the yellow, soft-covered 1999 reprint of Illuminations, the one with the Hannah Arendt introduction, which I bought in the UEA campus Waterstones in 2002 at what for me then was great expense. I covered it in plastic, as if it were an elementary school textbook (do kids still do that?). I believe that particular edition / cover design is no longer available. I cannot share a photo of it with you because it’s not a book I have brought with me across the ocean from my parents home in Mexico City, where most of my personal library collected until the Autumn of 2004 remains frozen in time, gathering dust and moisture and mold and mildew.
Over the years I have acquired other editions of Benjamin’s works that include ‘Unpacking’, but in days like these when I get the urgency to revisit it I just search for the PDF (linked again in case you missed it above). I know the PDF cannot possibly have been shared completely legally; the file I have bookmared is a home-scanned version that to me looks seems a Xerox copy. It reminds me of my UNAM student days, when most hours of the day were spent in the library, reading and making xerox copies of complete books, books that we wanted and felt like we needed to keep; books that could not be found anywhere to buy locally, or simply were too expensive for us.
And back here in the present day, while handling book after book surrounded by the smell of cardboard, while thinking how and where they should be shelved, I am also thinking about my memory of many of the texts that meant something for me once and that in one way or another changed my life forever. My material memory of them is inextricably connected to the look and feel and smell of Xerox copies -fotocopias-, the effects of light and shade and the varying levels of toner on the paper and of the sound of the fotocopiadora.
I remember as crucial too the time it took to wait for a complete book to be copied/reproduced only for you (sometimes one would order more than one copy, for a friend), and then patiently and lovingly weigh the aesthetic and financial implications and choose the covers and ringbinders (cardboard or plastic? What colour?) that would turn that black-and-white smudgy printing on Bond paper into a codex publication you would proudly take home and file next to the other prized items in your personal library of mechanically-reproduced books. All that was considered fair use.
In the present time of my book unpacking, I cannot but recall that my love for books came from my parents1, and that my experience of reading and book collecting was simultaneously defined by not being able to buy all the books I wanted to. When leaving Mexico for the UK, one of the hardest things was to leave my library behind, and recreating a library was for me part of the process of self-exile and re-rooting. Making a new home meant filling it with books and records and other epehemera I collect and that to date I still find connected to my sense of self.
Now I have ran out of space to store more books. I have realised, in the process of packing and unpacking, that my attachment to many of the books in my collection is not merely a question of consumerist materialism. The books that make up my collection tell several stories of my life. The collection reveals the comings and goings, the mistakes, the right decisions, those present and those absent, the points of crisis, the revelations, the failures and the victories.
Curating a personal library is complicated for several reasons2 -- and one of those might be this connection to our lives and the moments that make them. Curating a life real-time is a good goal to have but it might be doomed to disappointment: life is what happens. Like life-writing, curation might be a process better suited for specific milestones, to be done retrospectively, with the benefit of hindsight.
I hope to write more about this in the future.
See footnote 1.