On the first Tuesday of the year, author and political activist
Don Winslow
tweeted a photograph of an avid reader’s dream library. Bathed in the buttery
glow of three table lamps, almost every surface of the room is covered with
books. There are books on the tables, books stacked on mahogany ladders, and
books atop still more books lining the shelves of the room. “I hope you see the
beauty in this that I do,” Winslow wrote in the tweet, which has been
acknowledged with 32,800 hearts.
اضافة اعلان
If you spend enough time in the literary corners of
Twitter, this image may look familiar. It rises again just about annually, and
the library has been attributed over the years to authors including Umberto Eco
and buildings in Italy and Prague. As with other images featuring beautiful
bookshelves, people go absolutely bananas for it. Winslow’s post received 1,700
comments, including one from a professor at Pace University who has been using
the photo as his Zoom background.
“It’s clearly the home of a person who loves and
collects books,” Winslow said in an email through his agent, Shane Salerno.
“For me, I think that photo is as stunning as a sunset. I could spend days and
days locked in that library examining each book.” He noted that there’s
something comforting about the image, since “it’s a room you could happily get
lost in.”
Winslow had no idea the origin of the photo. He had
found it on Twitter, but didn’t remember the name or location of the library.
(Though he believed it to be the personal library of a prominent author from
another country.)
The library, it should be known, is not in
Europe.
It doesn’t even exist anymore. But when it did, it was the home library of
Johns Hopkins professor
Richard Macksey in Baltimore. (I was his student in
2015 and interviewed him for Literary Hub in 2018.) Macksey, who died in 2019,
was a book collector, polyglot and scholar of comparative literature. At
Hopkins, he founded one of the country’s first interdisciplinary academic
departments and organized the 1966 conference “The Languages of Criticism and
the Sciences of Man,” which included the first stateside lectures by French
theorists Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man.
Macksey’s book collection clocked in at 51,000
titles, according to his son, Alan, excluding magazines and other ephemera. A
decade ago, the most valuable pieces — including first editions of “Moby Dick,”
T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock and Other Observations,” and works by Wordsworth, Keats
and Shelley — were moved to a “special collections” room on the Hopkins campus.
After Macksey’s death, a SWAT team-like group of librarians and
conservationists spent three weeks combing through his book-filled,
7,400-square-foot house to select 35,000 volumes to add to the university’s
libraries.
Surprise discoveries included an 18th-century Rousseau
text with charred covers (found in the kitchen), a “pristine” copy of a rare
1950s exhibition catalog showing Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, posters from
the May 1968 protests when students in Paris occupied the Sorbonne, a
hand-drawn Christmas card from filmmaker John Waters, and the original
recordings of the theorists at that 1966 structuralism conference.
“For years, everyone had said ‘there’s got to be
recordings of those lectures.’ Well, we finally found the recordings of those
lectures. They were hidden in a cabinet behind a bookshelf behind a couch,”
said Liz Mengel, associate director of collections and academic services for
the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins. Several first editions by 20th-century
poets and novelists sat on a shelf in the laundry room.
After the librarians from Hopkins and nearby Loyola
Notre Dame were finished selecting their donations, the remaining books were
carted away by a dealer, so Macksey’s son could prepare the house to be sold.
The library image sidesteps all those details to
evoke something more universal, said Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of the
Aesthetics of Joy, a blog about the relationship between decor and delight.
“We’re attracted to the image, and we come up with all sorts of stories about
who it might be and what it might be because we love to tell stories,” she
said. “But what’s really driving the attraction is much more visceral.”
Fetell Lee pointed to the photo’s sense of
abundance. “There’s something about the sensorial abundance of seeing lots of
something that gives us a little thrill,” she said. Also relevant: the
“satisfying” sense of organized chaos, and the awe inspired by the high
ceilings.
Pictures of books and libraries are popular across
social platforms. A representative from Instagram said that some of the
top-liked posts on the platform that include the words “library” or “libraries”
feature large quantities of books, a “cozy” aesthetic or a warmer color scheme.
What would Macksey think if he knew his library had taken on
a life of its own? “My dad liked nothing better than sharing his love of books
and literature with others,” Alan Macksey said. “He’d be delighted that his
library lives on through this photo.”
Read more Books
.jpg)
.jpg)
