Bookish By Nature

A bookish blog for a biblio bebé, I'm back in a library and I'm starting a graduate program to become an official librarian. I spent a year away from my library but couldn't stay away from libraries; I visited them in New York, Buenos Aires, on a cargo ship in the Atlantic, Amsterdam, Berlin, Philadelphia... in my time away a few things grew very clear in the landscape of my opinions: a library does not exist without physical books; the best libraries are those that librarians do not grip too tightly in their need for control and order; I may have fallen into a career in libraries but fate tripped me: I'm bookish by nature. 

Amsterdam Public Library:
#1 in the Netherlands, #1 in the world 

And how about information? I crave it, and I choose the nutritional internet when we're talking digital. Philosophically I could discuss prosthetic knowledge as it applies to information science for a while (knowing how to find information is more important that actually knowing the information), yet facts and methods and themes swim through my mind screen at random: putting myself on a digital information diet was the wisest thing I've done. I pretty much unilaterally reject BuzzFeed, xoJane, and Facebook. I choose my trusted sources and I seek my information from those places while continuously scrutinizing their slant, each source's tone, each one's gimmick. I admit I am addicted to the internet; aren't we all? Have you ever seen Tiffany Schlain's film called Connected: An Autoblogography? Twitter, running ProQuest searches, looking for high res images on Google, all of it literally gives you an uptick of dopamine similar to eating a piece of chocolate, smoking a cigarette, doing a line of cocaine... My approach to consuming information could be likened to an omnivore that insists on locally raised organic meat: I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna enjoy the heck out of it, but it's gonna be quality and guilt free.

The library of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam:
library porn, basically 

To further rely on this metaphor, I will graze on printed matter indiscriminately all day, and in this way I relate to the narrator of Camus's The Stranger: I too would read the same half torn newspaper story a million times if stuck in a prison cell. I want to run my fingers over a hardback's paper weight, inspect the binding (double fan adhesive bound? saddle stitched?), smell the ink, study the font, inspect the dust jacket's inside flap matter... bored on a public bus, I will snatch up the very dirtiest scraps of the SF Chronicle and scan the headlines... idly eating an afternoon snack, I will peruse the weekly circular ads, judge their graphic design team's use of color, font, grid, and flow. And to focus: when we talk books, we talk content, we talk typography, graphic design, engineering... we could talk books forever...  those beautiful multidimensional carriers of civilization—Thoreau got it right...