Unpacking my library: A Talk about Book Collecting Flashcards
(13 cards)
Author
Walter Benjamin
- Intro
“seeing daylight again after two years of torture”- anticipation
passion= chaotic
collectors passion = chaos of memories
Disorder appearing as order
true collector seeks whole background
physiognomists
Habent sua fata libelli: for a collector not only books but copy of books have their fates
The Divine Comedy, Spinoza’s Ethics, and The Origin of Species have their
fates.
To a true collector the acquisition. of an old book is its rebirth.
Childlike element which a collector mingles with the element of old age
- own book and collector
Writing own book- most praiseworthy
Whimsical def of a writer: dissatisfied with the books they could buy but did not like, not just cause poor
Dont read all their books: Anatole France- havent read 1/10th of his collection
Author’s library slowly expanded- had to read book first before new one
Switzerland- books with real value are difficult to obtain
At the eleventh hour I sent my first
major book orders from there and in this way was able to secure
such irreplaceable items as Der blaue Reiter and Bachofen’s Sage
von Ianaquil, which could still be obtained from the publishers
at that time.
Book collector buying books is very different than anyone else buying books
> pg 63Collectors are people with a tactical instinct;
their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange
city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote
stationery store a key position.
- real library
Money or expert knowledge isnt enough for the establishment of a real library
At auction must tell which book is best and keep cool to not get carried away by competition
best feeling- buy book to give it freedom: the way the prince bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights
most exciting auction: Balzac’s Peau de chagrin
> 1915 at the
Rümann auction put up by Emil Hirsch, one of the greatest of
book experts and most distinguished of dealers. The edition in
question appeared in 1838 in Paris, Place de la Bourse. As I pick
up my copy, I see not only its number in the Rümann collection,
but even the label of the shop in which the first owner bought
the book over ninety years ago for one-eightieth of today’s price.
“Papeterie I. Flanneau,” it says. A fine age in which it was still
possible to buy such a de luxe edition at a stationery dealer’s!
steel engravings- french graphic artist
famous Munich collector Baron von Simolin. He was greatly interested in this set,
but he had rival bidders;
last year at a Berlin auction.- negative auction
rare works on occultism and natural philosophy were worthy of note
genteleman kept topping speakers offer (on all of them)
Most excited for rare Fragmente aus
dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers [Posthumous Fragments of
a Young Physicist] which Johann Wilhelm Ritter published in
two volumes at Heidelberg in 1810- but gave up hope
Didnt bid, no one did, went back few days later and got it form 2nd hand section
- unpacking and collections
Noon to midnight unpacking- couldnt stop
the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal
owner
Even though public collections may be less objectionable
socially and more useful academically than private collections, the
objects get their due only in the latter
Running out of the type- ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only
when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only
in extinction is the collector comprehended
- Ending
Last half emptied case- now he is flooded with memories
For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen
to it that for a collector-and I mean a real collector, a collector
as he ought to be-ownership is the most intimate relationship
that one can have to objects.
Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings,
with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.
Essay
- engages you in a creative way about an idea or topic
- always provisional: doesn’t have to start somewhere and end somewhere else
- doesn’t have to answer questions
- expand how you think
- comfortable with open ended question, skepticism, doubt
- essay is about the unfolding of meaning
- somewhere between non fiction and creative writing
- the genre is uniquely suited to the times we live in. The rise of digital media has brought with it a flood of sharing and storytelling in different forms, and in an era of ever-briefer attention spans, “an essay is short and rarely takes more than an hour to read.”
- The literary essay is always a provisional thing; unlike the academic essay, a literary essay doesn’t have to be didactic in answering a question;
- The literary essay is a form that is comfortable with skepticism, doubt, and self-doubt,”;
- “Instead of lecturing you, it invites you into the pathways of the mind of a self that is examining, testing, and speculating. As [German social theorist Theodor] Adorno said, the essay isn’t responsible for solving anything. And that suits an historical moment that’s filled with uncertainty and mistrust of dogmatism.”
- So in our first lecture, I mentioned a couple of ways in which we might begin to read more closely, to notice with greater attention, and to think with greater clarity about what we are reading;
- And I want to build on that idea a bit by getting you to think about the essays we’re reading as adventures in the complexity of the self;
Essay about book collecting and the subjective relationship with these objects
Books have a certain objectedness in the world, their thingness
A relationship to books is a relationship to these things, not just whats in them but what you think of beyond that, goes beyond utility and usefulness
Good reading is slow reading
“Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting” was published in 1931, and if we were to summarize it, we might say that it is about book collecting and our subjective relationship to our books; You could substitute another kind of object, but books work particularly well because they’re a text with a readability and an object-ness to them; anyway, for Benjamin, he believes that a relationship to books is “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is, their usefulness. He uses words like “love” and “enchantment” to describe his relationship to the library; Faced with the task of unpacking it, he is filled with images and memories he associates with the books: cities he visited, rooms he occupied;
Essay about a library
Private, public, big small, various shapes, hold books
They’re also objects of curasition , specifically chosen
collective idea= every book is a story of acquisition and ownership
Books are a revelation of their personality
Two fold existence, readable and form part of who we are (extension of our personality)
- House he lived in until divorce
- live alone for first time in his life
- threshold of 40 without property, assets
- storage for 2 years
Speaker
Instantly part of an action in the essay
Speaker wants to linger on the disorganisation of the books before they’re packed away
Place you in the setting and in the intimacy as if you are the same as he
- Let’s jump into it straight away then; Look at these opening sentences. They immediately make us witnesses to an activity which, like Woolf’s pencil, is the pretext; it establishes the premise straight away;
- Just a couple of lines down he says “I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates… to join me among piles of volumes, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood…”
- And still further down, “would it not be presumptuous of me if… I enumerated for you, I presented for you…”
- There is a sense that we’re being let into something quite intimate here; As an interesting comparison, in your tutorials this week, the poem “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning features a similar kind of confiding, distinctive first-person speaker,
Unpacking
Unpacking is something we might want to linger on as an idea, here; it’s an expansive and untidy activity; the care you take putting each object away in the process of packing is displaced in reams of packaging, wrapping and general disorder; here the books spill onto the floor or pile up in precarious columns; you can conjure a scene of disarray;
Order/disorder
Unpacking of the books exposes the library is an illusionary thing, looks complete but if you take them out of the shelves, the illusion of order is shattered
things can be placed neatly but as soon as something disturbs them- sense of order is gone
Every passion of collector but books= memories, as soon as you unpack memories or disrupt, that sense of order disappears
Think we remember or understand things from past in a orderly way- but then when you think about it, they become disordered
need to allow ourselves a sense of disorder to see what we actually have
Digression
creates movement in the essay
moves away from initial idea and into something else
Gap: books being open and then being put on the shelf (sidepoint for the digression moment)
Moment that sparks creativity
Essay breaks away from physical act
What it means to be a writer and work with language
Author is displaying dustractive way of thinking but control over what ideas hes placing
Esay is ideal way of thinking of writing
Another way is to steal; this is Benjamin employing dry German humour to put a point across that the truly eclectic collection of books often includes the books of others;
What is crucial for us to note here is that perhaps unlike Brownings’ Duke, Benjamin is possessed of a certain degree of self-critique – the I is being displaced here but it is also being turned back upon itself; he admits that his intense affection for his books represents a kind of fetishism that most bibliophiles will be familiar with; we know that the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who collect books, and the kind of people who ask “have you read all of those books?” when they walk into your house and see a floor to ceiling bookshelf filled with thousands of books.
- What Benjamin is talking about here is how unpacking becomes an immersive activity; in reading yourself, you lose track of time;
- We’ve all experienced the sense of beginning a task and finding that time has suddenly gone by far more quickly than we might have thought;
