In 1927, Walter Benjamin began his study of Paris’ arcades, a project he would continue until his death in 1940. Benjamin, a philosopher and cultural critic, was curious about the social function of interwar Paris’ many covered passages — pedestrian-only thoroughfares covered over with iron and glass, where the polis came to shop, but also to exchange news, ideas, and ultimately to live, outside of their home or work.
In his 1999 book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place,” making many of the observations Benjamin had made in the early part of the 20th century at the end of it. Oldenburg identified our homes as The First Place, or places of work as The Second Place, and certain communal spaces outside of either of those two as The Third Place. These somewhat public-somewhat private third places include libraries.
Libraries have been as central a feature of civilization as government or trade or social classes for thousands of years. In some cases, they have been private — collections owned by aristocrats, or university departments, or states — but in modern times, especially in the U.S. libraries are public spaces. In fact, they are among the few truly public places we have.
This week, librarian Grace Remp takes us into the quiet section, where we learn the essentiality of these institutions. For more on libraries (or The Bachelor franchise!) follow Grace on Twitter.
Enjoy,
SCREMES 🌞
The Roundup
Links to the stories you should be reading this week
Nicholas Ghesquière indulged in historical decadence for the LV show at PFW. ✺ French writer Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory takes on a gravitas in an era of Internet feminism. ✺ K-Pop Princess CL, formerly of 2NE1, goes solo. ✺ Laia Garcia-Furtado reflects on the meaning of getting dressed. ✺ Warm & Wonderful, makers of the iconic Princess Diana sheep sweater, have a website for the first time since 1979.
The Long Read
The week’s keynote story
Only going to read one thing? Read me.
Books Aren’t Sacred But Libraries Are Cathedrals | Grace Remp
I was a precocious kid, an only child with a big imagination, and a pretty large toolkit on how to keep myself entertained. I was social, but I never needed the company of other kids. Books were what I needed.
Part of it for me was the cachet of what it meant to be a capital R “Reader.” I was proud of being an intellectual before I had ever called someone else pretentious. I’m self-aware enough to acknowledge that the kid who would carry around 8 books between classes just to show off to the other kids that I was reading ended up as an actual librarian induces a massive eye roll.
I love all libraries. I work in one. However, the public library in my hometown of Hastings, Nebraska invokes a specific nostalgia, the likes of which only my grandma’s homemade ginger cookies and the Disney Channel Original Movies jingle can match. The public library was an easy walk from my elementary school, and then later, an even closer walk from my middle school. I have incredibly vivid images of sitting at a table on the second floor in the Adult Large Print Non-fiction section (the perfect hiding place because the collection was small enough, there weren’t many people looking for books there) with my friends reading aloud passages from Judy Blume and giggling as we learned about sex from something that wasn’t the trying-too-hard-to-be-hip book It’s Perfectly Normal that my parents had left on my bed in lieu of giving “The Talk.”
My parents were happy to drop me off at the library for hours, thrilled their kid was a reader, and I could learn whatever I wanted when I wanted. It felt rebellious! And what’s more, being 11 years old and getting to spend hours somewhere that wasn’t school or home without having to spend money is, I think, sort of radical. The library gave me access to everything. But I’m not really sure I understood that part of it at the time. I loved the library because I loved books, not because of what the space meant. It’s easy to think about the library as just a book warehouse.
It’s a bit strange, being a librarian now with a — I wouldn’t call it estranged — but a more complicated relationship with Print Culture. I have a broader concept of what a library can do for folks, and what it did for me as a young person without my realizing it at the time. Listen, I’ll never not be a reader. I’ll always get a small thrill when my friends ask me for book recs. Reader’s advisory is one of my favorite parts of my job. But my perspective on the impact of my favorite individual books versus the impact of the institution of the library has radically shifted in the years since.
Here’s what I’ve learned: Books are not sacred.
You can’t work in a library and not know that every few years you have to go through your collection and weed materials that aren’t circulating, or the non-fiction with outdated information. The purpose of this is to make sure a community has access to the best, most accurate information that’s available. It isn’t about book burning or censorship when you get rid of books. (If folks want a book we’ve weeded, we can probably still track something down for them.) It’s about making room for new information and knowing what your community needs are at the moment. We take those weeded books that people are not checking out and we donate or in some cases (clutch your pearls) even recycle them.
Books are literally physical objects. They are the text inside, but they are also the binding and the pages and the cover, all stuff carefully chosen to catch your eye. They are the objects we place on our coffee table so our friends know we’re cultured. We’ve anthropomorphized these objects, but that anthropomorphization was encouraged by ~caaapitalismmmm~ that pushed out books before any other products in the early days of industrialization. Print capitalism did a lot of dang work to make the literal object of books deeply desirable to learned middle-class people and elites as sacred status symbols and all of us Millennial and Gen-Z intellectuals are still eating that shit up hundreds of years later.
The part of print culture that I find icky and capitalist is when folks yell at Lauren Conrad for making a craft out of a book. Or when we use them as status symbols (which I am guilty of! If you think for one second I’m not an enormous hypocrite and I won’t get rid of my copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness because I want folks to remember I am Very Smart and I was a philosophy major, you’ve got another think coming).
Let me be clear. Books are an incredible technology. They give us information and stories accessibly — and in a way, that information has been stored and passed down for hundreds of years. Stories are important; literacy is critical; anything that gets folks reading is really great, and here’s one thing I believe down to my very bones: information is an incredibly valuable resource (knowledge truly is power, after all). And books are the technology that deliver us that resource.
I’ve had patrons make jokes to me about how crazy it is that libraries still exist with the internet making books moot. On the flip side, when my hometown library got a Makerspace, patrons asked the librarian there why they were wasting all this space that could be used for books.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding about the purpose of a library. Libraries are more than warehouses for books. That’s why they have computers and microfiche readers for patron use. We’re providing access to the community by providing them with whatever technology we can. While a 3D printer can’t find information for you, learning how to use it gives you a skill set you can take with you.
My purpose as a librarian isn’t just to shush you, but to help you find what you’re looking for. We’re trained to hunt down that little piece of information, or help you make a resume.
Let me reiterate: Information is a resource. Just as access to land, water, energy sources, etc. provide power, access to information does the same. And though information is theoretically inexhaustible, it is often inaccessible. Rare books, expensive databases, and perhaps most commonly, a lack of education in the skills required to navigate information-heavy spaces, both physical and digital. Libraries are places where folks can find employment information, print materials, learn English, enroll in health care, register to vote, and build community connections, and that’s remarkable.
Beyond that, the amount of truly free public spaces is shrinking. I’m sure there are others, more niche spaces, but most communities have at least parks and libraries, and parks do lose some of their usefulness during freezing cold winters in colder climates. Libraries are a safe warm place for houseless people during the colder months, a free place for folks to entertain their kids, a place for grad students to park for eight hours and write fifteen pages of their dissertation and not have to buy a coffee every hour.
The fact that there is a PUBLIC space where you have access to all of that for free, where you won’t be kicked out? That’s as cool as reading about dry humping for the first time in Judy Blume’s Forever.
Watch
For a period of time, Studio Mk27, an architecture firm based in São Paulo, would make short films to document each of the extraordinary contemporary homes they designed and built. This one, featuring the house Casa P, is my favorite.
Cheers
I felt a literary cocktail would be appropriate as accompiment for this week’s issue. So, try a James Joyce, created by Gary Regan in tribute of the Irish writer.