08 April 2005
My university library is currently holding a booksale. The campus is soon to close, and in order to 'economise' and 'centralise', they must rid themselves of an entire third of their collection, before shifting the rest elsewhere. Their only criterion for dispensing of items appears to be 'whether anyone has taken it out in the past five years'. Obviously this counts against keeping books because of their intrinsic, or even moral, usefulness, and points to a purely faddish and managerial approach to literature. So what if no one has taken the French version of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason out for half a decade - you can't be brutal when it comes to these things! It's not a business, you kultur-destroying bloodhounds! Besides, that kind of thing will probably be read inside the library, rather than taken home.
Ok, so I got lots of books very cheaply (everything from Descombes to Gilson to Sartre to the Churchlands), and have been idly flicking through them. It reminded me of something I occasionally notice when I'm reading second-hand books - the hairs (presumably human) they contain. Odd black locks caught in the bindings, eyelashes, grey bits, strands of something altogether more ambiguous....momentarily disconcerting, I shake them away and try and forget that I'm not the only person who ever read this book (how dare they! Perhaps they understood it better than I did! Unthinkable!).
The point is, given that I find hairs in virtually every second-hand or public book I come across, would it be possible to find out anything about their owners, genetically, I mean? Could you possibly even clone someone from the DNA in book-hair (leaving aside the question of whether you would want to)? What if we went through Kant or Nietzsche's library, located an odd strand, determined it wasn't from one of those silly wigs men used to wear, and made a new Kant or Nietzsche (or Marx, or Feuerbach, or Schopenhauer...)? Books would thus document the history of civilization in an entirely new way....
So, I recommend libraries do not rid themselves of their collections just yet, in case a great mind once took out a collection of poetry and left a hair in it.
Of course, this would not apply to electronic libraries. Nevertheless, when I look at my friends' keyboards, they too are often full of hairs. Thus we should perhaps archive computer keyboards for the same reason.
