Nearly twenty years ago, in a bookbinding workshop, my instructor revealed two trade secrets that pushed my fascination with books into obsession: 1) in rare cases, personal notes–including love letters–have been found nestled under the endpapers of old books, and 2) if you expose the spines of books made during the rise of printing, you’re likely to find they’re lined with scraps from the bindery floor–fragments of pages from other books. Continue reading “History and Its Fragments”
“Libraries are innately subversive institutions born of the radical notion that every single member of society deserves free, high quality access to knowledge and culture.”—Dr. Matt Finch
Libraries are indeed a radical idea. Rather than purchase a book, I can simply go to my public library and borrow it for no fee whatsoever. Free books for everyone! Apart from the single purchase of a book by the library, it is a collective slap in the face to free-market capitalism. Some conservative voices in the nineteenth century, in fact, strongly attacked libraries for being “socialist continuation schools” that created a culture of dependency for those who could not pay market value for the books they wanted. And some continue to argue this even now. Continue reading “Embracing the Subversive Nature of Open Access”
