Reveries of libraries, the forty-second: Tsundoku

 

Today I attended a university librarians’ day, an annual get-together of amongst the most vital people in the institution. Several sessions   saw recurring discussion of the now issue of digital and print resources, sometimes thought mistakenly as digital versus print resources. Asked how many e-books the university currently holds, our IT person guestimated four hundred thousand, and counting. Some would call this a professional example of tsundoku, the practice of buying more books than you can read. Now to be asked how many books in the library, I can reply nonchalantly, oh over four hundred thousand. The word emerged in the Meiji era (1868-1912), that is after Western culture took its kind of books into Japan. The pleasure of acquiring books overruled all sense of the time taken to read them, but then what are libraries for? And with the Japanese, aesthetics plays a leading part, tsundoku too possessing the meaning of leaving books lying around or stacked up to be read later, a visual delight all their own. It has not the connotation of hoarding, but rather of collecting for use in some unspecified future moment, maybe tonight, maybe next year, maybe never. Looks good. What’s in there? Read on. Bibliomania is an excessive end product of the practice, the superlative of tsundoku, because tsundoku itself is surrounded with an air of innocent discovery. I don’t have to be a librarian to find myself off the street magically in a bookshop curiously inspecting every new title on display and studying jackets and unquestioningly purchasing two three let’s make it five new books for that future moment when they can be either read, or left impressively scattered on level tabletops or set against others for mutual support on the latest shelf for that future unspecified moment. For many of us, the practice started young. It was necessary, even then, to have every book that we would possibly need to have read in the next twelve months. Which book was less the question than, which books? The solidity, the immediacy, the presence of the print book inspired tsundoku, too the unknowns within any one of those unread discoveries. This is to be surrounded by possibilities, things heard of, worlds and words heard about, to embark on one fine day. Much as e-books save clutter, they must be subscribed to, inscribed electrically on a page that tomorrow may be blank, their platform dropped, their space unreplaced. As I jotted down during the librarians’ day session, only print books exist in perpetuity. Which came first, librarians or tsundoku? A house of opened and unopened books is the home of interested existence.