Reveries of libraries, the forty-fourth: The Importance of Being Important

 

It’s worth getting earnest about importance. Our personal libraries are the accumulated result of acquiring books we find important, even if others think differently. The effectual and ephemeral reside nearby with equal distinction. The vital and the vapid sit about the place in charming tsundoku positions. Surrounding ourselves with the objects of our satisfied desire is to remind us of this mutual value. Sentiment is one reason our books stay where they are; emotional attachment is another. Some books are important to keep because we will visit them again, sometime or other. The intellect is at play. Some books get us through a rough patch. Then, the tsundoku principle kicks in, we acquire these books to read some time, just don’t ask when. Some must have signed first editions, or anything in their area with a good review but always in hardback. Collectors of pop-up books call it a thing, as the latest acquisition opens with a hand standing on the page, made from origami card; this practice can get out of hand. Nothing can be more important to a reader than being in the midst of the book they cannot put down. Riveting, absorbing, engrossing, and other words involving physical connection are used to explain the feeling of a book they simply devour. The cool, calculating librarian can only guess from afar these private experiences of getting physical. They who can only rely on circulation statistics for meaning, the fortune wheel of the zeitgeist, or judging the book by its cover. Private collectors will surround ourselves with more of that which promises connection, thus at some future time turning these works into the importance of being important. If we manage a public library, the complexities proliferate. The importance of a book is tied existentially to its potential reader. This is why the latest edition of a textbook will only be important until the next edition comes along, while the uncut rectangle of yellowed pages dated 1923 can be the sole copy in existence, the lynchpin of a researcher’s construction, the missing link in their thesis. Which one do we cull first? Research libraries embrace, sometimes in an all-consuming way, their role as institutions of tsundoku. They give thanks daily for the privilege of having what no one else has and making it available, sometimes long after the book seemed to have lost any sense of importance. Our disposable, one-use society will keep relearning as if for the first time how importance has very little to do with sale and demand, the flying fickle finger of fashion, how its essential meaning is between the hand that wrote the page and the reader for whom this is the hit, the it and a bit, the rivet, the holy grail. Such a reader may visit the library sometime next week; or they may not yet have arrived at this our fretting stage of existence.