Exhibiting European Books in American Libraries

This paper is an unpublished DRAFT of a paper presented (in somewhat altered form) at the conference, "Le livre exposé: Enjeux et méthodes d'une muséographie de l'écrit," organized by the École Nationale Supérieure des Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques and held at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Lyon, France, 25-27 November 1999. In its present form, the paper lacks documentation and updating to reflect changes introduced for actual presentation. It is not to be quoted or published without the express consent of its author.

I am grateful for the honor of your invitation to speak about the exhibition of European books in American libraries.

Do Americans appreciate and understand "the European bibliographical patrimony" differently from our European colleagues? I would be surprised if, at root, we did. I suspect that both American and European institutions have to work less to interest our publics in specifically "European" or "American" books or manuscripts as such than we must to interest them in any books or manuscripts at all. The point of all our exhibitions is to interest our visitors in our holdings. We hope, too, that interested visitors will not only look at exhibited materials but also, if our exhibitions work, be moved to read, study, or use them in some way. The geographical origins or dates of composition of exhibited materials are secondary concerns. Our primary hope, that our holdings be used, is not easy to realize -- not in libraries any more than in schools. If The New York Times can be trusted in such matters, French cultural authorities face difficulties in convincing French schoolchildren that reading Racine or Corneille, Balzac or Flaubert, is a good idea. An American, finding these troubles unsurprising and depressingly familiar, wonders if Europe's own older books really speak more intelligibly in Europe than older books speak to today's Americans. For all the miles that separate my American library from your European libraries, our situations are not, after all, very different. Revealing the significance of any of the books we exhibit, and promoting their use, are challenges more like than unlike, no matter the soil on which our libraries sit.

The United States is a big place with many different libraries. I can speak about them on the basis of work experience in only four American libraries. Located in Pennsylvania and New York, two Middle Atlantic states, they are hardly typical. Two are university libraries, one small, one large-ish. Two are independent research libraries, one small, one very large. Europe, whether its books or its libraries is our topic, is not really less difficult to represent, to categorize, than the United States. The first-generation American-born son of a mother whose family came from Frankfurt-am-Main and of a father born in Minsk, I wonder how broadly or complicatedly this conference's organizers conceived the category of "European books" as they planned the conference. For example, does it include not only books printed in Frankfurt-am-Main in Latin, Greek, German (or Yiddish or Hebrew) but also books printed in Minsk in various Slavic languages, as well as German, Yiddish, or Hebrew? Whose classics -- whose Europe -- are we concerned about? I find concepts and categories such as "Europe," "European book," even "European language," troublesome. They presume a certain essentiality, may even be founded on some distasteful genetic presuppositions, that are at best difficult to demonstrate. The world in which I work resists easy definitions. My library and professorial colleagues, students, and readers, all come from many different backgrounds. How different is my situation from yours? How different are the problems I face as a librarian, trying to exhibit and to explain European books to my audiences, from the difficulties I face as a teacher, trying to teach and to explain European texts to my students? How different are they from the problems you face in a Europe that has become -- if it was not always -- nearly as diverse as my America, a Europe that is also nearly as remote from its own past as is my America?

A teacher as well as a librarian, I presently have students who are reading Donne, Herbert, and Milton, seventeenth-century English religious poets. Their family backgrounds are European, Asian, and African, and their religious backgrounds, I assume, are not always Christian. What knowledge would they bring to discussion of the religious views, should the topic arise, of Donne, Herbert, or Milton? I tell my students that it can be helpful, in a class of this sort, to know something about European history during the early modern period; and about Christianity (which is, I add encouragingly, "one of the world's great religions"). I cannot be certain that they will know much about either. My reality is a multi-cultural classroom. My task in it is to entice students from backgrounds just as "diverse" as mine to an interest in and engagement with literatures of chronologically distant times and geographically distant places.

My task as a librarian does not differ in the slightest.

It is a pedagogical task. It calls upon me to excite the interests of diverse audiences in topics they know little about and whose importance they do not always find immediately obvious. Quite literally nothing compels my students -- or me -- to take any interest in Europe's histories, its religions, its books, or its literatures. We face no compulsion, have no need, to assume that these are somehow exceptional or essential. We all come from so many different backgrounds that our alternatives are legion. We could even show interest in America's histories or literatures. There is, after all, a good deal of both.

Like my students, visitors to my library are also free to ignore Europe's history, its religion, its books, or its literature. If I may be impolitely blunt, Europe may be made an interesting subject for American students or readers. It may even be an important subject for Americans, economically and (as in the former Yugoslavia) militarily. And, of course, culturally. But it seems no longer to be a required subject. My task as a librarian resembles my task as a teacher: to entice readers, just as I try to entice students, into engagement with the books my library exhibits that will make them seem, despite not being required, a worthwhile elective.

In practice, libraries, like museums, put up exhibitions for many reasons. These can include thanking a donor, or attracting one; providing an occasion for its own staff to learn about a library's resources; or filling exhibition spaces that library directors, like the goddess Natura who abhors a vacuum, want to see filled. We could all add many other reasons. The one in which I am really interested here is that some libraries and their administrators believe that -- like universities -- they have an educational function. To them, it may therefore seem a good idea to put up a show in the expectation or hope that someone (in addition to staff) will learn something from it.

This pedagogical impulse underlies an exhibition my colleagues and I mounted some years ago. Exemplary for my purposes here, that exhibition was called "The Work of (Book)Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Fine Bookmaking in France and Germany Between the Two World Wars." Originally, we had hoped at least to try to flatter a potential donor, but it turned out that his books were already promised elsewhere. We went ahead with the exhibition anyway. First, we thought we might learn something ourselves about a kind of European book not all that widely collected in the United States. Second, the exhibition would fill exhibition spaces our director likes to see filled. Most important, however, we thought our lender's books might make an educational show for the constituencies we flatter ourselves we serve.

Exhibiting these books presented a chance for us and for our audiences to think about the function of books at a time when their domination of the means of transmitting and preserving information, knowledge, and civilization is constantly eroding. Here was a selection of books quite idiosyncratic in many ways, their function perhaps their most curious idiosyncrasy of all. Some are the ordinary stuff of the private and fine press collector. But not all of them. The collection contains a kind of book -- often French or German, usually illustrated -- which attracts, in the Anglo-American bibliophilic world, relatively little interest or collecting competition. What were the makers of these books -- livres d'artistes -- responding to, what were they trying to create, when they made these books? And what could a library do, when it showed them, to bring to some sort of life a kind of book that lies outside the experience of most of our students, faculty, and visitors? These books lie outside their experience even if they are among those for whom the book, rather than "the media," remains a primary means of appropriating knowledge.

Our exhibition space would have accommodated a large (and indeed an endearing) show of sumptuous pieces. We could have given it a sage and serious title. But it would really have been a show of "Pretty Books from the Collection of" our lender. Given the nature of his resources, people would have stopped to look. But "pretty books" is a somewhat problematic category, even though it remains all too common an organizing principle in book exhibitions. Our institution and our audiences need something a little bit more constructed. "Pretty books" makes no point at all. Their exhibition hopes merely to elicit pleased exclamations from passers-by. To make a point, to construct a point, is to make the books speak to the passers-by, to give them a voice which, when they are being exhibited, is what they need most.

We in the library need them to have a voice, too. Our students and faculty are audiences to whom, first and foremost, we must speak, or permit our books or manuscripts to speak. If we do not do this, gradually our audiences will cease to be interested in the library. Eventually they will cease even to be aware of or to care about it. Our books and we must both speak to them in ways that have some chance of capturing their interests if we are to survive as meaningful constituents in the intellectual life of the university and the broader community.

We found our entrée into the collector's books, one we hoped would provide them a meaningful context, through the context of a dead but now much-studied and -valorized cultural theoretician, Walter Benjamin. We wanted our audiences better to appreciate what, without some such context, could otherwise seem merely a collection of pretty but irrelevant bibliographical jeux d'esprit: "pretty books." Giving them no intellectual context, we would have betrayed the books, their owner, and our responsibilities by failing to provide any content to attract the thoughtful interest of our audiences. Pretty books will attract a glance, or a pleased exclamation. We wanted something more. If Benjamin illuminates the context from which these books emerged, then they relate to issues now vital in the American academy. But because books on exhibition cannot speak for themselves (especially not about relationships that, however vital, are not also obvious), it is our responsibility to try to speak for them.

Benjamin's point, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," is fairly complicated: it is not "light reading." Using his essay for the purposes of our exhibition, we altered -- and perhaps reduced -- it in ways that might not pass muster in a scholarly journal. But what my colleagues and I wanted to do -- what, in fact, we thought we had to do -- was not write an article for a scholarly journal. We get paid to do something else. We wanted to put up a show that would focus attention on part of a collection with many unusual and beautiful objects in it. We wanted that part to be coherent. Focusing on finely-printed illustrated French and German books made in the period between the two World Wars gave us a coherent starting point. Such books are often unfamiliar to our readers and visitors, for they are not common in many American libraries, including our own. Moreover, coming as they do from two very different bookmaking and esthetic traditions, these French and German books are not often looked at together. (Can one, even now, comment, without at least some slight degree of awkward self-consciousness, about mid twentieth-century French and German intellectual and esthetic relationships?) Yet these books offer interestingly complementary as well as contrasting solutions to similar esthetic problems. In short, our motives combined a desire to show our audiences things they don't ordinarily see anywhere with the hope that we might do so in a way that would provoke thought. Such motives are, I believe, quite proper in a pedagogical setting.

Deploying Benjamin in such an exhibition may, however, seem more a rhetorical than a legitimate intellectual move. We think that is not so. In fact, he proved irresistible because his work is so variously resonant with the books we were displaying. Benjamin lived in Germany until he ceased being the right kind of German. Then he took himself to France. A literary and philosophical intellectual, he concerned himself with what it means to be "modern." Specifically, he asked what it means to be "a work of art" in the modern world. In his modern world -- as in ours -- technology makes art instantly accessible, instantly reproducible. Is this a good thing? a bad thing? or just a thing which, like many other things, we need to understand?

Exhibiting books from the period in which Benjamin lived and wrote, and from the two countries in which he mainly lived and wrote, we found Benjamin increasingly inescapable, even if only as a rhetorical device. But we found him both a rhetorical device and something more than that. What we were showing were -- indeed, what we contain are -- books. Considered as works of art (which they sometimes are), books raise many of the issues that Benjamin raises, and they always have. What does it mean to say of a book -- intended to be accessible and also, precisely by way of differentiation from the manuscript which preceded it, mechanically reproducible -- that it is "a work of art"?

And hence the frame for the exhibition we mounted, a fraction of our lender's collection of French and German imprints from 1918 through 1939. Benjamin, knowledgeable about books, a resident of both Germany and France, was a person almost literally specific to the years between the two world wars. Could these books, or books like them, have formed part of the undergirding, part of the experiential superstructure, through which Benjamin came to know, and then meditated about, the issues raised by "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"?

We asked the question. We did not answer it. Does this make our show dishonest? I do not think so.

Books are often less easy to exhibit than works of art. We often say, glibly, that books speak for themselves. The sad truth is that, contrarily, books are mute unless they are read. But books on show cannot be read. They also cannot be touched, handled, or sniffed. But most of all, they cannot be read. Despite these handicaps, we want people to be interested in the books we show. We want them to feel that those books provoke reflection upon things worth thinking about. If our exhibitions provoke them to return for another look at the books they contain, to read and contextualize them, to ask questions of and about them, to become, in short, intrigued enough to want to use them, then perhaps they have achieved their pedagogical goal. Perhaps they have achieved that goal even if our visitors disagree with what we have said or feel that they could have asked better questions, provided better answers, than we did.

Different libraries, quite legitimately, define different functions in their exhibitions from those functions I have just sketched for us. Some may have the luxury of speaking only to themselves. Others may speak only to their donors. Others may feel that impeccable scholarship and exactitude that answer questions, rather than merely asking them, are alone permissible. In our situation, we have to try to engage students and their teachers -- and to do so in a world in which we face competition from a lot of other possible media through which the world can be apprehended and interpreted. We mounted this exhibition to suggest not answers but questions. In a world in which art is just another mechanical reproducible, what do these books do? What is their function, what are they trying to say to their consumers -- and, years later, to us as their viewers? Many were clearly produced by makers who thought of themselves as stretching between two very different worlds, the world of the reproducible book and the world of the individualized and unique work of art. What prompted them to attempt such a stretch? How well did they succeed? Was their effort worthwhile? Does their example shed light on larger issues of art and modernity? Had we mounted this exhibition today, we would have provided it with a web version. Ironically, such a version would have enabled us to make our point more forcefully than, at the time, we were able to make it. Digitized images of reproducible books and individualized and unique works of art could have pushed online visitors to the site to think precisely about the status of what they saw on the screen. Benjamin offers a provocative framework in which to think about such questions. For our audiences, his current stature helps to bring a now distant historical context -- "between the wars" -- and a distant geographical context -- "Europe between the wars" -- closer to home.

Libraries and librarians tend to participate in the worlds of teaching, learning, and study passively. We await the arrival of students or other readers who need one or another of the books or manuscripts we keep for them. Exhibitions are among the few occasions when we take a more active role. More often than not, I think, we squander the opportunity exhibitions give us actively to engage our varied audiences. At my institution, our ineptitude, ignorance, and lack of imagination may have kept this exhibition from fulfilling all of its potential. But as we worked on it, my colleagues and I felt that, whatever else might be said about our show, it was not an opportunity squandered -- at least, not thoughtlessly. By making its curators think, these books just possibly have had a similar effect on some of those who looked at the show.

You will, by now, have noticed what I have not said about this exhibition. It was not framed as an exhibition of European books. It did not hearken back to a lost and far-away place from which its organizers assumed their visitors would have been, at some past time, torn. It did not hearken back to a now-distant past that its organizers assumed their visitors would view nostalgically. It did not assume that these books, by virtue of their Europeanness, would exercise an automatic attraction for culturally deprived American audiences hungry for their patrimony. The exhibition tried instead to frame the objects it displayed in terms of issues that, neither American nor European, have contemporary esthetic and intellectual currency for academic audiences.

Exhibiting older manuscript and printed materials -- materials that date from the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries -- our approach is similar. Were we, for instance, to exhibit examples from our run of Italian Renaissance epic poetry, we might refer to studies that discuss how Ariosto's publishers worked to canonize Orlando furioso more or less immediately upon its appearance. We would frame such an exhibition by locating it within a context emphasizing canon-formation, publishing history, and the presentation of texts in the material objects that contain and transmit them. Exhibiting Spanish and Latin American books dating from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, all concerned with Spanish activities in the New World, we focused on issues that concerned the relationships of colonists and indigenous peoples across a broad range of human activities. An exhibit earlier this year of literal "European books," flown over for the occasion from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, was organized largely by our colleagues who came to us from Belgium for this purpose. A large printed catalogue provided extensive scholarly background about the materials on exhibit. A smaller handout, as well as case labels, framed the materials somewhat differently from the catalogue, however. These told the history (but let me call it "the story") of a library repeatedly risen from the ashes. Despoiled by the French (during the Revolution) and then again, in this century, by the Germans during the 1914 and 1939 wars, it was rebuilt after 1918 and again after 1945, on both of these occasions with considerable assistance from the United States. By foregrounding issues that are neither "European" nor "American" but rather have contemporary academic, intellectual, and even popular currency, we hope that we are emphasizing ways to think about the books we show -- and even about the institutions that house them. By posing real problems or telling real stories about them, we hope we are giving them a voice that speaks to our readers.

More modern books, wherever they are printed, are treated no differently. Currently preparing an exhibit of selections from an enormous collection of modern English-language poetry given us as a gift, we will not frame the show in terms of the "Important Poets" the collector was able to acquire. Such a frame, we feel, would not differ from that of the "pretty books" approach we rejected when we exhibited French and German illustrated books. Our audiences assume that we accepted the collection because it contained Important Poets. They require no reassurance on this point. Instead, we emphasize questions the collection raises about the reception, the audiences, for modern poetry. The collector was poetry editor for the United States' newspaper of record, The New York Times. Although it is a "paper of record," it is not now nor has it ever been an intellectual journal in the sense that one might use that term of a newspaper like Le Monde or Corriere della Serra. What kind of interests did our collector have that his newspaper permitted him to express? Which of his interests was he unable to see into print? How did the entire newspaper, not just his small area of it, review, receive, books and authors its poetry editor personally valued? What poets got bad reviews? Or none at all?

These questions, asked about one of the most important American reviewing organs, have genuine significance for the ways in which one segment of modern literary expression found -- or more often failed to find -- its readers. Exhibited poets will include not only Americans but also Canadians, West Indians, English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Africans, Indians, Australians, and New Zealanders; the collection contains exemplars of all these Anglophone traditions. The poets' varied places of origin do not interest us; that is not, we think, the issue they pose. The topic that we hope will interest audiences that we are, in effect, inviting to look at poetry books -- most unsympathetically -- behind glass, is their reception. That reception helped to create the perception that these writers are all more or less difficult, hermetic, obscure, unreadable. They thus exemplify a modern poetry that has, all too often, ceased to speak even to the kind of well-educated people who read "newspapers of record," in part because such poetry often goes unmentioned by that very newspaper. The materials are being shown behind glass. We are asking, so to speak, whether they were (metaphorically) located behind glass at birth: just the opposite, if you will, of the way his publishers presented the world with Ariosto's Orlando furioso.

Am I describing anything that you do not already do, do not already know? I doubt it. The context I work in is geographically American, chronologically late twentieth-century. Your geographic contexts are European, but your chronological context is exactly the same as mine. Your audiences are also similar to mine. Judging, in fact, from the visiting students and faculty I see daily, your audiences are quite literally the same audiences as mine. It's a smaller world than the one people of my age grew up in.

Manuscripts or books interest our audiences not because they are new or old, not because they are American or English, French or Polish, Japanese, Ugandan, or Argentinian, but because they are presented to them in terms of their interests and concerns. They will read, look at, and be interested in, older European materials, as well as newer American or Hispanic or Indian materials, if they are presented to them in meaningful, that is to say pedagogically successful, ways. In proffering to them what we exhibit and what we hold, we need to teach them why they should care about it.

Librarians where I come from speak about our task, our mission, as threefold. We are supposed to acquire, make accessible, and preserve the materials, manuscript or printed, we gather for our collections. Gather enough of it and the world will beat a path to our door. That is a nice definition of our mission. But it is no longer enough. We have, in one sense, succeeded too well with missions one, two, and three. The vastness of what we have collected leaves it no longer obvious. Its parts, constantly increasing in size, and the relationships between its parts, constantly increasing in complexity, seem increasingly incoherent and off-putting. Our very success has burdened us with a fourth requirement: interpretation; teaching; pedagogy. This is as requisite of the ways in which American librarians must treat European books in their American institutions as it is of the ways in which American librarians must treat American -- or Nigerian -- books in their American institutions. Or of the ways in which European librarians must treat European books -- or American or Haitian ones -- in their European institutions.

Nearly twenty years ago, Paul Raabe of Wolfenbüttel spoke at a conference in Boston urging librarians to assume responsibility for the study of the history of books, printing, and publishing, that is, for l'histoire du livre. That talk is now dated in ways that Raabe might not have predicted. Librarians, auctioneers, booksellers, and professors in a wide array of disciplines all now work in this field. This change does not free librarians to reject Raabe's 1980 advice that we look inward, at the history of the material artifacts with which we work. However, if we are to continue to speak to our users and engage them in thinking about and using the materials for which we care, then it is now time for us also to look outward, to the interests our users and supporters express in the materials we collect for them. Those interests may be, indeed, they increasingly are, book historical in nature. But they may also be broadly cultural and historical. Like all good teachers, we need to become not only narrowly expert in one field but also broadly aware of other fields that provide ways for us to reach people whose interests and expertise may not be congruent with ours but to whom we wish to speak anyway.

In this essay, I have not emphasized new digital or other technologies. We use them. You do, too. If you had hoped that a visiting American would deal with such matters, then I apologize for my failure to live up to your hopes. They might be misplaced hopes anyway. My library's exhibition preparator honed her technical, computer, and esthetic skills in the place where she was raised and educated through university: Lille. My library's web designer also found an education close to home. She is a graduate of Paris VII-Denis Diderot. Their examples provide me with a hint that the application of new technologies to exhibitions may not be something you need to hear about from a person who hails from the New World, despite "good old American know-how."

I have, however, dealt with something that is at least as quintessentially American as technology, maybe even more quintessentially American than technology. But I have not yet specified what I am talking about, for it is something not often mentioned in learned circles. When it is mentioned, it is rarely with any admiration at all. It is "marketing."

We have a product. Books, manuscripts, information, knowledge, civilization, our product -- call it by any or all of these terms -- has audiences, markets, whom we use our exhibitions to try to reach. We need, I suggest, to think about how to reach them: that is, to think about how to market our product to them. This is a concept whose gross vulgarity I confess without, I fear, therefore feeling much impulse to apologize for it. People who pick up a pencil to correct a typographic error in the book are acting, whether they know it or not, as textual editors, Paul Oskar Kristeller once commented. He added that they will be more careful correctors if they notice that textual editing is what they are doing. We are already doing marketing whenever we mount exhibitions. We might do them better were we actually to notice that what we're doing is marketing: seeking the audience our product needs.

In mid-November, I participated in a conference in Philadelphia of representatives of regional cultural institutions. People from libraries, museums, and universities were among them. So were representatives of convention and visitors' bureaus, hotels, businesses, and the media, all concerned with marketing the Philadelphia area as a cultural resource destination. It is easy to look at Americans and our obsession with marketing, even of "Culture," as particularly crass. We can seem perfectly self-caricaturing in this respect. My visit this past summer to Theme Park Scotland suggests, to my innocent eye, that America may have as much to learn from Europe in such matters as, whether you like it or not, you think you have to learn from us.

My concern is to market my library and its contents. I want its books and its manuscripts (and its photographs, its sound and video recordings, and its online databases) to be read, to be used. I think -- no: I know -- that, if they are not used, they will not survive. They will disappear more rapidly through disuse and neglect than through use. And, when they have gone because they stopped mattering to anyone, they will not be missed.

The question American librarians must ask about the materials they care for -- European, North or South American, Asian, African, or Pacific -- is the same question European librarians also must ask. In fact, you need to ask it about American books, if you have yet discovered them to be important enough to collect, as much as about European ones. How do we engage potential readers with these materials? How do we present any of it to them in ways that indicate that it is only as distant from us -- in date, in geography -- as we allow it to remain by failing to imagine how we might learn to hear it? How do we teach them, how do we teach ourselves, to listen?