the bookshelf as surrogate self greg snyder
exhibitions biography markers of time identity material histories
The way I collect books vacillates between casual habit and a ritualised activity as closely linked to a sense of self as anything I can imagine. I realise that my books are a measure and a record of what I have given consideration to, as well as what I aspire to give consideration to. My collection of books is a portrait of how I have come to identify myself, and have worked to form a self. A book has many frames of reference, from its author’s oeuvre, to its Dewey Decimal Classification, to how a reader projects a unique consciousness to it. For the collector of books, the shelf is the customary host for assembly, display and storage. Some might see the shelf as utilitarian, a solution for an efficient and compact consolidation of a book collection; others might conceptualise the bookshelf as part storage, part theatre – a spectacle of both an interior landscape and a landscape of the imagination. This sense of possibility (and opportunity) is echoed in Italo Calvino’s essay ‘Whom Do We Write For? or The Hypothetical Bookshelf’: Whom do we write for? Whom do we write a poem for? For people who have read a number of other novels, a number of other poems. A book is written so that it can be put beside other books and take its place on a hypothetical bookshelf. Once it is there, in some way or other it alters the shelf, expelling certain other volumes from their places or forcing them back into the second row, while demanding that certain others should be brought up to the front. 1 This prospect of animate interaction between books on a shelf invites us to consider the shelf as a ground for play, curation, speculation and strategic composition and juxtaposition. Altering the shelf underscores how physical relationships between books impact meaning and significance within the situation of being on a shelf. Calvino characterises the distillation of relations into concrete form in ‘Ersilia’ from Invisible Citie s: In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey, or black- and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled: only the strings and their supports remain. 2 Aldo Rossi in A Scientific Autobiography describes the rewards of being attentive to relations: The emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings. 3
all images Greg Snyder
Books as a measure of interests, and the collection of books as an instrument in the act of self-definition and re-membering, was the catalyst for an exhibition that I curated entitled Heroes and Reminders: Faculty Bookshelves from the CoA, and installed at the school of architecture where I teach. Leading with the passage from Italo Calvino above, each faculty member was asked to identify the books that had shaped their thinking, interests and even their scholarship. Their collection of books forms a portrait of any given faculty member, and the bookshelves collectively, a portrait of the entire faculty. The exhibit shared dimensions of the faculty with our students that they might not be aware of, and revealed to them that their teachers have breadths of interests and curiosities that encompass a rich variety of subjects that both include and transcend what is simply thought to be architectural. Initially, the assumption was that the exhibition was for the students, that the students would be the beneficiaries of this peek into the inner workings of the faculty.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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