Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2004 Issue
Burning Desires
Is it more important to repair damaged copies or elaborate the library's role as teacher?
The extraordinary collection at the Amalia Library was inevitably acquired using some or even many collecting techniques and strategies. The motivation was personal, the acquisitions personal and the total accumulation a matter of timing, luck and perseverance. Book collecting, at the highest level, is an obsession and the ex-post-facto imposition of an exoskeleton of collecting logic and justification does not change this fundamental fact.
So, how should a library, that reflects the fullness of collector obsession and has experienced an extraordinary loss, react? The Amalia Library is now a repository of great books rather than simply the manifestation of a collecting obsession born to epic levels. So it seems less important to repair or replace the lost material. If the library today finds its primary daily purpose for being in providing information for research then it's reasonable to acknowledge that many of the lost and damaged books are accessible elsewhere. Spending treasure to reconstruct damaged books may be a theme that inspires contributions and government support but the far greater good will be to spend this money to digitize as much of the collection as is practical and useful. In this way the material is no longer confined to the library's structure and will in time find its way into educational projects all the way from second grade Mozart reports in Tanzania to complex language analysis at the highest university levels in London, Cambridge, Chicago and Berkeley.
The Amalia Library long ago stopped being a collection. Today it is a resource and the money it receives because of the fire should be spent to further what it is today rather than to honor what it was in the beginning. Let us honor the past by embracing the future.
