Outdated materiality in the library

libros cuyas páginas, finalmente, aprendí a cortar, para no comprobar, meses después, que estaban intactos   

books whose pages I at last learned to cut [in advance] so as not to find them still intact months later

- Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph (my translation)



Even though I am not a book historian per se, I am frequently reminded of various ways in which the book as an object has been designed and made, ways that are no longer in use but which remain within our field of vision because we still make use of books belonging to a bygone era of book-craft. Today was such a day, as I was looking up a few sources in a 1938 volume of Diplomatarium Danicum, a series of edited letters and documents that pertain to medieval Denmark. One of the pages that I needed had evidently not been needed by anyone else at the University of Oslo, because the quire – the sheet folded into pages during the binding of the book – had not yet been cut. As can be seen in the photographs below, this book was a relatively cheap paper-bound volume where the quires were left for the buyer or the reader to cut themselves. It reminded me of the quoted passage in Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘El Alepth’, in which the narrator recounts the painfulness of seeing the books gifted to the woman he loves lying uncut and therefore unreadable in her house. 

Today was not the first time I encountered such uncut quires, but I decided that the wisest thing to do would be to ask a librarian for help rather than taking the matter into my own hands. (First of all, I do not have a knife of any kind in my office, which I probably should rectify.) The librarian I encountered, a helpful man who has been very good at solving problems for me before, remarked that he was glad that I had not done the cutting myself, which in turn prompted me to suspect that there are those who do things their own way. He first produced a paper knife, but upon closer inspection, seeing that there were several quires that were uncut, he took the book with him to another part of the library to trim the edges of the book and open the quires by simply cutting away the outermost part of the edges where the folds were.

 

When the librarian returned, he expressed delight in the sensation of rubbing one’s finger along a freshly cut edge, so I decided to test it myself right away. And he was right: the smoothness of the trimmed paper – paper that is thicker than what we often encounter in books produced nowadays – was pleasant, both because of the feeling itself but also because this was an unexpected opportunity to come closer to a material aspect of the book that I had not reflected on. I felt that I had been exposed to a part of the practice of book-handling that has been lost to us, but which once was part and parcel of buying and reading books. The whole matter became like a micro-adventure, an object lesson in a historical reading practice. That brief moment of running the flat of my fingertip against the smooth edge of the book gave me a deeper understanding of the materiality of the book in this particular period, the period when books were still cut.           

The librarian made a joke about how this was a case of going into unknown territory, since those particular pages definitely had not been read by anyone at this university. This joke made me realise that on a very small level I did feel a kind of ownership to this book since it was on my prompting that these quires were now opened. The feeling is not serious, of course, but nonetheless a nice reminder that when we handle books the way we do in academia – daily and in many different formats and conditions – we come to appreciate them as more than mere tools of communication and conveying knowledge, but as historical relics in their own right. And if I leave no other mark on the University of Oslo, having made a few more pages of an old collection of edited sources is not a bad legacy.