I was charmed by this @nypl post on Instagram:
Miniature items from the Rare Book Division must be three-inches or less to qualify as *mini* and hitch a ride in a repurposed card catalog where they’re snugly stored.
And then I realized I have my own tiny rare books collection in my own card catalog:
In today’s newsletter, my summer reading assignment for y’all:
- Visit your local library and apply for a library card. (Or pay your fines and renew.)
- Ask a librarian for a tour of the library building, the online catalog, and the digital holdings. Ask the librarian to show you how to put materials on hold, how to request materials for purchase, and how to use interlibrary loan.
- Check out at least one item. (So you have to return.)
Read the rest here.
In my latest newsletter, I wrote about becoming obsessed with Roget’s Thesaurus, after realizing that every thesaurus I’d ever picked up was alphabetical, and alphabetizing a thesaurus basically destroys the meaning behind what Roget was trying to do.
“We tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms,” writes Roget’s biographer, Joshua Kendell. “But Roget’s is essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Roget’s, the user starts with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it.”
Read it here.
Adam Sternbergh has started a newsletter, and his first dispatches concern his “Year of Reading Recklessly,” brought about by a sense of dissatisfaction looking at his year-end list.
“My reading life had become a grim slog,” he writes. “My TBR pile — ever higher, ever teetering, ever chastising — had become my enemy and jailer, not my conspirator and friend.”
(Unfortunately, I can relate!)
To spice things up, Adam set himself new goals: “Browse more. Purchase impulsively. Let books surprise me. Give myself a chance to stumble on something revelatory.”
He sprinkled some tips amongst his list of recent shelf discoveries:
Lesson 1: A.B.B. Always. Be. Browsing.
Lesson 2: Books make the best souvenirs.
Lesson 4, 5, 6: Very short books are a great way to leaven your reading routine and let you take risks you might not otherwise take. Also, trust staff picks. Also, if you set a reading goal, cheat with abandon.
You can read more over at Substack.
I love this idea of reading recklessly. I can point to two things have helped me: Kindle sample chapters and weekly visits to the library.
Here is a photo of one of the lamps that frame the entrance to the Defiance Public Library, designed by the Wing & Mahurin architectural firm in 1904. Accompanying the hand holding a torch are the supposed last words of Goethe in German, “Mehr Licht,” or “More Light.” (As @JoshLipnik explains, “It’s common to see tributes to Goethe at American libraries, especially in states like Ohio which had many immigrants from Germany at the time.”)
“More light” is a near-perfect motto to put on the side of a public library, but it’s even more meaningful when you know something about Goethe, who is not only seen as a giant of the German en-light-enment, but also spent decades of his life literally investigating light, culminating in his work, Theory of Color.
Goethe’s big idea, as far as I understand it, was that light is pure and doesn’t contain color, but rather that our perception of color is the result of light colliding with various mediums of darkness, and that the spectrum of colors we see is the result of a “polarity” between light and dark. So, unlike Newton, Goethe didn’t think of darkness as the absence of light, but polar to it, something for light to interact with. (More on the difference between Newton and Goethe.)
According to Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, Goethe sought refuge in his color studies in times of personal and political struggle. (Apparently he had a “large paper sack” made to fit all of his manuscripts, color charts, and sketches.) Many people were angry at Goethe that he was wasting his time on color when he should be speaking up about more pressing cultural matters. When Goethe finally published his book, scientists mostly mocked it or ignored it.
But his color studies colored his understanding of life. He wrote in his diary on May 26, 1807:
Love and hate, hope and fear are also only different conditions of our murky inner life through which our spirit looks either toward the light or toward the shadows. If we look through those murky organic surroundings toward the light, then we love and hope; if we look toward the darkness, then we hate and fear.
As for his last words, “more light,” while they are poetic and symbolic, what he actually said to his doctor on his deathbed was probably a little more down-to-earth: “Do open the shutter of the bedroom so that more light may enter.”
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Filed under: light
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