A life put into words - histories and memoirs on the library shelf

 

library titles for history (Dewey 940s) rotated to make titles easy to read

At the branch library there is a bookcase filled with a variety of histories and memoirs to browse. Considering that each title is a self-contained work of one or more authors, almost always drawing on published work of others and interviews and other primary source material, as well, the true scope of page counts implicated in this modest collection is staggering, representing a volume of writings maybe 20 or 50 times as big as the space of this one bookcase.

The relationship of a book to its subject matter is similar to the classic illustration of an iceberg: the part that is visible (the individual book) is only a small fraction of the whole thing (cumulative mass of all the books and research sources used to create the one book that is visible on the shelf). Besides this compressed form of knowledge that the photo displays, there are other ways that the set of printed pages bound into book form are remarkable.

Asking a fish to describe the sea that it swims in leaves many important dimensions untold, since so much is taken for granted. The same is true in certain ways for a historian writing about the present day and the historical antecedents to it. Unlike the fish, though, a trained reader and writer of history can consult outside perspectives, cite documents, and study records for clues to bias and omissions. The books in this photo each represent many hours of drafting, then editing the books (not forgetting the shoulders that an author stands on and those many hours to author the earlier books on which the present-day books depend). Each title gives a representation of earlier people, places, and events. Necessarily, the process of telling about events requires "selective memory," leaving aside some parts in order to focus on other parts. That filtering effect probably owes something to the writer's personality and experiences, training and area of expertise, and current events and preoccupations around the time of composing the first draft. Having access to certain sources, but not to others, will play a part in the resulting book, too.

So much for the remarkable things going into this line-up of printed pages and the topics present (and by contrast the many other subjects that are absent). Another dimension of this library bookcase photo is the readership. It would be interesting to know what the lending patterns pre-pandemic and during the pandemic have been, either matched to demographic segments (male vs. female, retiree v. teen v. working age) or simply in the aggregate to discover which books are most and least circulated during their service life (until relegated to storage or sold). After all, the books in this photo appeal to certain sorts of people but not to others. Some readers are voracious in their appetite for the printed word (leaving aside the universe of ebooks offered to borrowers, too, as well as downloaded audio books or the audio CDs on a separate shelf), but others just read one book at a time and only a few per year. However, the usage patterns and sociological profiles may turn out, though, it is remarkable that busy residents of the city, surrounded by the "too much information" of 100s of cable TV shows, and the bottomless reserves ancient and modern discoverable online, still hunger for the people and places and events found on the books classified under the Dewey Decimal System under the history label.

Thanks to the Internet, such things as     archives of images, moving pictures, primary sources, and public domain books and music are only a few clicks away. It is getting easier than ever to travel in time or place by using these traces of earlier times and places. And yet, some readers eagerly browse the authors on this shelf to discover those worlds glimpsed through the mists of time in the words of delightful authors in well-organized chapters and paragraphs. It is hard to know exactly, according to the person or more generally for most readers of histories, what reasons attract people to the ink on these pages. Perhaps it is a desire to fill in hazy outlines of a particular time or place in the reader's mind; maybe there are personal or genealogical connections to the subject matter; or possibly the reader is hungry for escape from modern times and finds a sense of order and certainty that hindsight projects onto things. In any case, the books on these shelves - indeed on the shelves for all the other categories of publications recognized by the library system of classification - speak to certain readers and not to others, they reveal truths, and teach those searching for answers a few of the pieces to the puzzle that forms in the person's mind, one book at a time. Generations from now some of the same motivations will be there to write and to read history, although in that time maybe the idea of printing with ink on paper will be antiquated.