The number of pages he wrote about the mode of ordering a library the Italian Roberto Calasso sumo hace un tiempo las suyas, a little work with its title, ‘Cómo ordenar una librarian’, has the simplicity of what a treasure is. Posted in Italy by Adelphi in 2018 and now edited in Spanish by Anagrama, Calasso’s essay is an erudite and humorous lesson on this need that all the owners of a collection of books he has acquired at some point in his life – his books are free, acaso literarias–, esa empresa ardua que el involucrado pospone ad eternum until it makes no apologies, rendered to the pieces of those scents or miles of volumes that require an immediate redistribution. But the result is that, oh, it’s a goose bump. A rompecabezas, a game, a record of the proprietary biography, which the books signify to the implacable and carious way.
A metaphysical theme
“It’s a highly metaphysical theme,” Calasso wrote in the first page of his essay. “I am surprised that Kant did not dedicate a letter to the letter”. Computers’s library staff all over the world have reason to believe: this is not a bad thing. “Organizing a home library, by the way, involves work”, writes in Lluís Agustí, Professor of the Faculty of Information and Mitjans Audiovisuals of the UB (o, lo que es lo mismo, profesor de futuros biliotecarios), en su artikulo ‘Organització de una librarian o familiar’. In the case of practical questions such as furniture and lighting (capital, which is known as a bibliophile), you have the question-mill: how to order. “Work hard and have a short time to do it, but it is a tarea that suele is agreeable. Refuse reading memory and find joyful things to learn or relear ”. Organize your own library supone a encounter conceived differently, with the past reader and possibly with the passage in general. It is an important activity.
On mental map
Porque a personal library is a map, that’s what I mean. Calasso writes that, “to enter a dwelling, reconciles quickly, including only by the color and typography of the lomas, what is the mental landscape of the house duo ”. Oh, as Gabriela Olmos writes in the splendid issue that the magazine ‘Artes de México’ dedicated one year ago to libraries: “What do you think of a personal library? All that the man who the meeting proposed. The library is an extended and eloquent retreat ”. Some of them are very powdery and take the perspective of someone who has a home with his books. Have a look at what it is a mental naturism, biographic vase, lo mejor es que sea alguien de confianza.
The Central, the “ideal library”
Meervoud, a collection of labyrinths and verbs, Calasso’s essay contains a moment in the concept of “ideal book”, which for Italians is not outside the Central of Barcelona. “Recuerdo haber comprado en La Central algunos Italian books that have not seen antes”, write the author in the middle of a puppet of elogious parrots. For the Italian, The Central satisfies the rule that it defines as an ideal bookstore: “Aquella in which each time is bought at least one book, and with much frequency in water (or not only water) that can be bought when we enter”.
Calasso –Recalls the director of the library, Antonio Ramírez– visited the bookstore for the first time in 15 years. And the lie, the old foxes that flew to Barcelona, passed visitors. His first comment about our appearance in an article published in ‘La Stampa’ de Turín, on the occasion of the Book Fair of this city. Strongly influential is the fact that another article by Umberto Eco preceded the superior part of the page in that it was called “the ideal book”; more abbot, Calasso responds: “Exists, is in Barcelona and is called La Central”. Through the publication of the article, books of Rome, Catania, Padua and other places of Italy travel to Barcelona to know. “Fue nuestro momento de gloria, soon we will have the most famous bookstore in Italy ”. Amplio, Ramírez says that Calasso’s formula can be applied today in “he does not have books that he recently opened in the city”, and added that all of them are based on criteria such as a “careful selection” of the present property “How to design an harmonic landscape”. Ramírez distaca las librarías francesas como referentes, y por encima de todas Ombres Blanches, and Toulouse.
Infinity of models
Regarding the specific form of ordering a personal library, the only consensus is that there is no better way than otherwise, and that in the end there is a personal question. Alphabetical arrangement, arrangement for genres, landscapes, editorials, colors … “Unafwendbaar en algunas áreas, el orden alfabético sería letal si se aplicara a todas ellas”, writes Calasso toe. “Bookshelves – about the hongos, about plants in Cornualles, about famous partisan de ajedrez and other cases in innumerable quantities– are taken as a result of frequency with olvida to the author. Insertarlos en un orden alphabético general equivaldría a perderlos de vista ”. In ‘High Fidelity’, Nick Hornby’s short story, the protagonist proposes to classify his discs in the order in which he has acquired it, with the intention of conforming as a kind of autobiography, a criterion that can be perfectly applied to the books (some of which he hecho, or at least for the time being). In any case, it is worth noting that, as Rafael Vargas wrote in his own post on this issue of ‘Mexican Arts’, “A library is not a mere depository of books. It is necessary to give a direction. Without the crease as the disease. What is being treated is to design a garden ”.
Writer’s Library
Question: Enrique Vila-Matas, how would you like to have the ideal library arranged? Antwoord: “Of the mode that the Ghana ordained to its owner”. Ask: What criteria do you use to order your library? Has the same name ever been changed or changed? ‘Did not mention that haya changed no criteria. Hy ido created with the time an unclassifiable order, more geographer than librarian or librarian. A secret classification, accompanied by alphabetical tyrannies and compared to a visual memory that allows me to record each one, and locate it, from a view, to the locations. And it is calculated that there are more than 5,000 books in the house ”. Question: Are your books in a separate room or located in the established order? Answer: “They are modestly incorporated into the general order”. All that matters is to consider everything that the writers’ libraries are a separate world in the world of libraries. From Carlos Monsiváis, for example, Rafael Vargas writes that he was “a self-proliferating self in which only he could orient himself well”.
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A colophon mode
In colophon mode, Calasso commented on the criterion of Aby Warburg, founder of the Library of Cultural Studies of Warburg, to order the books: “An intention to reproduce in space the thinking of the Warburg proposition”. Vaya-Matas is also visiting the personal library of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and records the facility with which to find the Shakespeare copies. “One copy for my myths, because the author of ‘El Gatopardo’ (what a great novel!) The Sacramento went on his excursions to Palermo. La verdad es que me encantó tocarlos ”. Y vaya the way in which Lluís Agustí, our library expert, arranges the books de la suya: “Literature is linked alphabetically by authors with the Independence of Languages, Generations and Epochs, así the novel with poetry, the Catalan with the Castellano, the French and the Portuguese oorleef. History books, by epochs, from prehistory to the contemporary epoch. The books on Spanish exile, with specific themes. Books on books, libraries, libraries and reading, on specific topics. The books of philosophy, also by epochs, and within them, by alphabetical order, empezando por los author griegos. The books on religion, by traditions: Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, heterodoxias … The reference books (dictionaries and encyclopedias), by formats and mano. Finally, the ancient books of the XVI to XVIII, for formats ”.