Burning Books

 

Exactly a century after the burning of Washington another invading army encountered a library, and saw it as a perfect way to strike a blow at the heart of their enemy. This time the action would have a global impact, as the means of spreading news had been transformed in the century since the burning of the Library of Congress troubled the young George Gleig. The burning of the library of Louvain University (known then as the Université catholique de Louvain) in 1914 by the invading German army would be the focus of profound political outrage; unlike the Washington incident, the fate of the library would figure as an international cause célèbre. Young Louvain Jesuit Eugène Dupiéreux wrote in his journal in 1914:
 
“Until today I had refused to believe what the newspapers said about the atrocities committed by the Germans; but in Leuven I have seen what their Kultur is like. More savage than the Arabs of Caliph Omar, who burnt down the Alexandrian library, we see them set fire, in the twentieth century, to the famous University Library.”
 
Louvain University was the earliest university to be established in the country that is today known as Belgium. Founded in 1425, the university had educated a number of great minds, including the theologian Saint Robert Bellarmine, the philosopher Justus Lipsius and the cartographer Gerard Mercator. The university was comprised of separate colleges (by the end of the 16th century there were 46 of them), each of which had built up book collections during the Middle Ages, with the result that no central library existed until the foundation of the central university library in 1636.
 
This library grew over the succeeding century and a half, its collections increasing in size through purchase and donation. Louvain was a comparatively rich university and its riches helped the development of the library. In the late 17th century a new approach to shelving, recently established in France, was adopted with bookcases fitted against the walls of the library, with windows above, as opposed to the old medieval and Renaissance fashion of bookcases projecting out from the walls into the library room.
 
Between 1723 and 1733 a new library building was constructed, and as the 18th century progressed the wealth of the university meant that it could acquire collections beyond those needed for the immediate use of the scholars. This development was given a strong boost by the allocation to the library of the national privilege of legal deposit in 1759 by Charles Alexander of Lorraine, the governor general of the Low Countries (who also allocated the privilege to the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels). A few years later the library was the beneficiary of the forced closure of a neighboring library—the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 allowed the library to purchase books from the library of the Jesuit house in the city (the books from the Louvain Jesuits are now dispersed across the world and continue to appear in the antiquarian book trade).
 
The university suffered during the late 18th and early 19th centuries as the French Revolutionary Wars spread into Europe. Louvain’s faculties were forcibly relocated to Brussels in 1788-90, and the university was formally suppressed in 1797, and then refounded in 1816. Almost ten percent of the books in the library—more than 800 volumes of incunabula (books printed before 1501), illustrated editions, and Greek and Hebrew books—were forcibly removed to Paris in 1794-5 by officials of the Bibliothèque Mazarine (a fate that befell other libraries in the region, including the Bibliothèque Royale). Other books were cherry-picked by the librarian of the École Centrale in Brussels.
 
The university and its library were temporarily closed again by the revolution of 1830, which created the Belgian nation. The university reopened in 1835 as the Catholic University and the library became a symbol of national renewal, an engine for intellectual and social power and a crucial element in cementing the university’s new role in the Belgian national consciousness. It was also made a public library, one of three (with Liège and Ghent) in Belgium, but regarded as the greatest.
 
By 1914 the library at Louvain had over 300,000 volumes in its collection, and a group of special collections of international quality. The importance of the library could be seen in its glorious baroque buildings. Its holdings reflected Belgian cultural identity, documenting the intellectual contribution of the greatest minds of the region, and preserving the university’s strongly Catholic cultural flavor. It was also a national resource, as a library of legal deposit and open to the general public. There were almost a thousand volumes of manuscripts, mostly classical authors and theological texts, including the Church Fathers, and medieval philosophy and theology. It also held a sizeable collection of incunabula and uncatalogued collections of oriental books, and manuscripts in Hebrew, Chaldaic and Armenian.

 
The university librarian before the First World War, Paul Delannoy, embarked on modernization from the time of his appointment in 1912, as by that point the library had become organizationally behind the trend in academic librarianship, and the reading rooms were quiet. He began to sort out backlogs of cataloguing and to acquire new research collections, taking a more contemporary grip on the organization of the institution, a process that was dramatically halted on the night of 25 August 1914. Just as at the Library of Congress the destruction that followed would be catastrophic, but would also eventually allow a great leap forward to take place.
 
German troops arrived in Louvain on August 19, 1914, having violated Belgian neutrality in marching through the country en route for France, and for about a week the town functioned as the headquarters of the German First Army. The Belgian civilian authorities had confiscated any weapons held by ordinary Belgian citizens in advance, warning them that only the Belgian army was authorized to take any action against German forces. Modern scholars of the First World War have failed to find any evidence of popular insurrection against the Germans. On August 25 there was a series of atrocities in Louvain, possibly triggered by a group of German troops who, in a state of panic, fired on some of their own troops. That night the reprisals began. Belgian civilians were forcibly removed from their homes and summarily executed—including the mayor and the rector of the university. Around midnight German troops entered the university library and set it on fire using petrol.
 
The entire building and almost all of its collections—modern printed books and journals as well as the great collections of manuscripts and rare books—were destroyed. Although Germany had been a signatory to the Hague Convention of 1907, which stated in Article 27 that “in sieges and bombardments all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes,” the German generals remained hostile to its spirit, especially to the sense that war could be codified.

The Hague Convention would eventually incorporate much stronger sanctions for acts of violence against cultural property, but its power in the First World War was still relatively weak. The burning of Louvain University Library, and the response to it from the international community, would help change this, not least by the inclusion of a separate clause in the Treaty of Versailles dealing with the reconstruction of the library.

 
On August 31 the Daily Mail reported “A crime against the world,” stating that Germany could not be forgiven “so long as the world retains a shred of sentiment.” The leading British intellectual Arnold Toynbee felt that the Germans had deliberately targeted the intellectual heart of the university, without which it could not carry on its work. The French Catholic newspaper La Croix felt that the Barbarians had burned Louvain. The German view, echoing the excuses given by the British army in Washington in 1814, was that there was civilian resistance in the city, with sniper fire on German troops, which triggered the atrocities.
 
In the immediate aftermath, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany sent a telegram to the American President—no doubt fearful that the incident might encourage the Americans to join the Allies—arguing that the German army had merely responded to attacks from the civilian population of the city. On October 4, 1914, following accusations of war crimes, a group of 93 prominent German artists, writers, scientists and intellectuals published a manifesto concerning the events in Louvain. It was entitled “An appeal to the world of culture” and was signed by some of Germany’s most prominent cultural leaders including Fritz Haber, Max Liebermann and Max Planck. They wrote: “It is not true that our troops treated Louvain brutally. Furious inhabitants having treacherously fallen upon them in their quarters, our troops were obliged, their hearts aching, to fire a part of the town as a punishment.” The controversy over the cause of the library’s destruction has continued for over a century. In 2017, the German art historian Ulrich Keller laid the blame for the devastation once again at the feet of the Belgian resistance.
 
Romain Rolland, the French writer and intellectual who was a great admirer of German culture, wrote in puzzled indignation to the Frankfurter Zeitung in September 1914, addressing his words to his fellow writer Gerhard Hauptmann, calling on him and other German intellectuals to reconsider their position: “how do you wish to be referred to from now on if you reject the title ‘Barbarian’? Are you Goethe’s or Attila’s descendant?” Hauptmann’s response was unequivocal: better to live as Attila’s descendants than have “Goethe’s descendants” written on their tomb.

 
Not all Germans felt this way. Adolf von Harnack, director of the Royal Prussian Library in Berlin (now the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), a great biblical scholar in his own right, and one of the signatories of the “manifesto of the 93,” wrote to the Prussian minister of culture to suggest appointing a German official in occupied Belgium to ensure that libraries would not be damaged in the rest of the war. The proposal was accepted and in late March 1915 Fritz Milkau, director of the University Library in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), was sent to Brussels to take on this role. Milkau brought with him such people as a young reservist soldier who was librarian of the University of Bonn, called Richard Oehler, and they visited 110 libraries in Belgium discussing conservation and protection.
 
The fourth anniversary of the destruction of Louvain University Library was marked by a commemoration held in the French port of Le Havre, the seat of the exiled Belgian government. The government officials were joined by representatives of the Allies who made up a diverse group including an envoy of the King of Spain and a delegate from Yale University. Public messages of support were sent from across the world as the mood of sympathy for Belgium shifted emphasis from outrage to support for rebuilding.
 
In the UK the John Rylands Library in Manchester was one of the most visible and generous of the libraries that felt deep empathy with the losses of Louvain. In December 1914 the governors of the library decided to donate some of their duplicates to Louvain in order to “give some practical expression to the deep feelings of sympathy with the authorities of the University of Louvain in the irreparable loss which they have suffered through the barbarous destruction of the University buildings and the famous library.” They earmarked 200 books, which they felt would be the “nucleus of the new library.” The John Rylands offered not only their own books but also to collect books donated for Louvain from private and public collections in the UK.
 
Henry Guppy, director of the John Rylands, was the driving force behind British support for Louvain. He issued a pamphlet in 1915 reporting an “encouraging” response to the public appeal for donations of books coming from as far afield as the Auckland Public Library in New Zealand. In fact, Guppy’s efforts were remarkable. In July 1925 the final shipment of books to Louvain was made, bringing the total to 55,782, which took twelve shipments to transfer and represented around 15 per cent of the books that were lost in the destruction of August 1914. The authorities in Manchester were enormously proud of their efforts, demonstrating that the plight of Louvain University Library touched ordinary members of the public far removed from Belgium.
 
As the war ended the international effort to rebuild the library moved up several gears. This process was aided by the special inclusion of the library in Article 247 of the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919): “Germany undertakes to furnish the University of Louvain . . . manuscripts, incunabula, printed books, maps, and objects of collection corresponding in number and value to those destroyed in the burning by Germany of the Library of Louvain.”
 
America too saw an opportunity to support the international effort to help Louvain rebuild its library, not just to show cultural and intellectual solidarity but as an opportunity to convey “soft power.” Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, was very active in leading the American initiatives, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor sent books.
 
In October 1919 Cardinal Mercier, the Archbishop of Mechelen and Primate of Belgium who had led the Belgian people in resistance to German occupation, visited Ann Arbor to receive an honorary doctorate of laws. His bravery during the war was cited in the presentation, which was made in a hall packed with over five thousand members of the university, and in response the Belgian cardinal was at pains to thank the “boys” of America who had fought for the freedom of his country. After the Belgian National Anthem and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” were sung a book was presented to Cardinal Mercier. The book was full of symbolism. It was an edition of the Boethius text De consolatione philosophiae (The consolation of philosophy), which had been printed in Louvain in 1484 by a German printer, Johannes de Westfalia, who had come from Paderborn and Cologne to establish the first printing house in the Low Countries.

The irony of this particular vignette from history was not lost on the academic community at Ann Arbor. A Latin inscription was inserted into the book, which read: “I was printed in the University of Louvain by a certain German who there received most kindly hospitality. After many years I travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, to another land, where I happily escaped the destiny which was so mercilessly visited on my companions by the Germans.” This particular edition was one of the 300 incunabula, which was part of the Louvain collection before the destruction of the library, and was therefore chosen to replace a particularly precious lost item.
 
The architecture of the new library, which the Americans took it on themselves to raise the funds for, was to look to the past and not the future. The style of the new building chimed closely with the traditional vernacular of the Low Countries, particularly of the Flemish “renaissance” of the 17th century. But the library was to be big: enough space for 2 million books and influenced by the latest thinking in design for research libraries, especially those in American Ivy League universities such as Columbia, Harvard and Yale. The cultural politics at play over the renewal of the library were to be expressed in the decoration of the structure. Over the main entrance was to be a statue of the Virgin Mary, acknowledging the Catholicism of the city, while two coats of arms would bear the heraldry of Belgium and the United States.
 
The laying of the foundation stone in 1921 was similarly symbolic of this new Belgo-American relationship. Although the ceremony was attended by representatives of 21 countries and presided over by the King and Queen of Belgium, various cardinals and Marshal Pétain, the American involvement would take center stage.
 
The president of Columbia University and the American Ambassador to Brussels read a message of goodwill from President Harding. Henry Guppy’s view was that “This was America’s Day.” Eight years later, on July 4, 1928—the American Day of Independence—the official ceremony of inauguration of the newly rebuilt Louvain University Library was held. The American flag was prominent on stage and speeches were made by the American Ambassador, the chairman of the American committee to restore the library, representatives of the French committee and Cardinal Mercier. As if the American presence wasn’t already overshadowing the Belgian, a statue of President Herbert Hoover was unveiled during the ceremony, to honor his support of the project. The rebuilding of the library would become a major source of diplomatic tension between America and Belgium, and helped to generate the isolationism in foreign policy that would dominate American politics in the 1930s.
 

Despite these grand celebrations the completion of the renovation had become a pressure point for America throughout the 1920s, as the project became symbolic of American prestige in Europe. By 1924 the problems of funding were becoming visible in the media, the New York Times describing the rebuilding of the library as “A promise unfulfilled” in an editorial in November that year. The following month Nicholas Murray Butler dissolved his Louvain committee and passed the task on to Herbert Hoover, then US Secretary of State for Commerce. With other commentators in the United States bemoaning the failure to complete the library as a national disgrace, John D. Rockefeller Jr reluctantly pledged $100,000 towards it, seeing it as a patriotic duty rather than sharing any enthusiasm for the project. By December 1925 the funds had finally been found and the reconstruction of the half-finished library could recommence.
 
A further issue then rose to the surface. The epigraphy planned for the building by its American architect, Whitney Warren—”Furore Teutonico Diruta, Dono Americano Restituta” (the Latin is straightforward to understand: “Destroyed by German fury, rebuilt by American donations”)—had been conceived before the shift in political fault lines in Europe at the end of the 1920s. The sentiment of this inscription no longer seemed appropriate. Nicholas Murray Butler in particular began to have reservations about the wisdom of the inscription; he took up a new role that year as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a philanthropic organization much concerned with the role of libraries in post-war reconciliation in Europe.
 
A battle in the pages of American newspapers now ensued between Warren and Butler, and this soon spread to Europe. It became a diplomatic and public relations issue, which exacerbated strong anti-American feelings in Europe following the 1927 execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who were seen to be victims of unfair anti-European immigrant views prevalent in America. The battle over the inscription continued to the days immediately preceding the ceremony (on July 4 1928) to mark the completion of the building. Warren, supported by Belgian nationalists, refused to change the inscription. The university authorities, backed by US government officials, refused to allow it to go up, and instead placed a blank space on the walls of the library. Lawsuits were filed by Warren in the following two years and the issue remained in the news on both sides of the Atlantic, with the blank facade defaced by Belgian nationalists on two occasions. In the end in 1936 the original inscription was placed on a war memorial in Dinant, and the issue over the library finally stopped being news, and both the Americans and the university authorities in Louvain breathed a sigh of relief.

 
This peace would sadly be short-lived. Not only would the lesson of Louvain not be learned in the aftermath of the First World War, it would have to be taught again in the second. On the night of May 16, 1940, almost 26 years after the first destruction of the library, the reconstructed building was again mostly destroyed, and again it was the German armed forces that targeted and bombed it.
 
In The Times on October 31, 1940, in an article headed “Louvain Again,” the paper’s Belgian correspondent reported that “The Germans declare that it was the British who set fire to it this time, but nobody in Belgium has any doubt about the German guilt.” A German investigation committee conducted by Professor Kellemann of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), which had discovered tins in the basement originating from the Far East, alleged that they had been packed with gasoline by the British who then set them off by detonating three grenades. It was reported in the New York Times on June 27, 1940 from Berlin as providing “conclusive proof” that the destruction of the library was a British plot.
 
The president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, who had been so involved with the reconstruction, received a harrowing letter from the university librarian at Louvain:
 
“I am indeed grieved having to tell you that the library was nearly completely gutted by fire; that the fine stack rooms at the back, housing our precious collections, are no more and that only terribly twisted and molten girders remain of it. It is painful to behold . . . gone also the collection of incunabula, manuscripts, medals, precious china, silk flags, and catalogues. Practically, we have to start again at the bottom.”
 
The Daily Mail blamed the Germans as “guilty of the crime of destroying the ancient library of Louvain” in an article by Emrys Jones in December 1940, following incendiary air attacks on London, and for them it was one of the acts by “The Great Arsonists” of world history, alongside the destruction of the Cloth Hall at Ypres and the Cathedral of Rheims. It is as hard to prove the attack was deliberately aimed at the library in 1940 as it had been in 1914. The American-designed building, which had been claimed to be fireproof, did not protect the library’s collections. Only 20,000 books are known to have survived the bombing, and another restoration effort was established to rebuild the library, which was reopened in 1950.
 
The case of the double destruction of the library in the 20th century is one that invoked, on both occasions, the sense of cultural loss epitomized by the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. The loss of the collection was more than the loss of great treasures—and the intellectual value of the destroyed treasures has been played down by some scholars who instead emphasize the national and civic pride embodied in the library—it was for many Belgians their “bibliothèque de famille.”
 
Like the Library of Congress, which was also destroyed twice within a few decades, the acts of reconstruction at Louvain were more than symbolic. Both libraries put huge efforts into remaking buildings, rebuilding collections of books and manuscripts that would be used and reused over successive generations, and perhaps more importantly allowing ways of working to be reconceived. The German army may have seen attacking the library as an opportunity to inflict psychological damage on their enemy, and in the short term they were successful. The long-term result had the opposite effect. The library is very different today from the institution that was rebuilt in the 1920s and again in the 1940s and 1950s. Although the university was divided into two during the 1970s, with one speaking French, the other Flemish, the library of the KU Leuven (as it is known today) is an important hub for learning and education in one of Europe’s leading universities, helping Belgium stay at the forefront of the knowledge economy of Europe.
 
The shock of the loss of the library was the focus of the world in 1914, and to a lesser extent in 1940, but its story has slipped from public consciousness over the subsequent decades. The Holocaust would set a new standard for public disgust and outrage; the burning of individual libraries pales in comparison with the murder of millions. In both Belgium and Germany, however, public opinion is still preoccupied with the events in Louvain in 1914 and 1940; one community still feels a sense of guilt and responsibility, another continues to try to understand the motivations for what happened.
 
Excerpt adapted from Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge by Richard Ovenden, published by Harvard University Press.
 

One of Europe’s Great Libraries Didn’t Stand a Chance… In Either of the World Wars.  Richard Ovenden on the Unlucky History of the Library of Louvain. LitHub ,  December 2,  2020

The opening episode of Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos, first shown in 1980, lamented the most famous burning of books in history—the conflagration that destroyed the Library of Alexandria. “If I could travel back into time,” Sagan told his viewers, it would be to the Library of Alexandria, because “all the knowledge in the ancient world was within those marble walls.” The destruction of the library was, he said, a warning to us 1,600 years later: “we must never let it happen again.”

 
Sagan stood in a line of writers who, for the last two or three hundred years, have made the word Alexandria conjure up not a place—a city in Egypt—but an image of a burning library. The term Alexandria has become shorthand for the triumph of ignorance over the very essence of civilization. From the French Revolution, through the early history of the United States of America, from the First World War to the conflicts in the Balkans in the late 20th century, the word Alexandria has been a reference point for the subsequent destruction of libraries and archives. The greatest library ever assembled by the great civilizations of the ancient world—containing a vast ocean of knowledge now lost to us forever—was incinerated on a great pyre of papyrus.
 
The story of Alexandria is a myth—in fact a collection of myths and legends, sometimes competing with each other—to which the popular imagination continues to cling. The idea of a truly universal library, a single place where the entire knowledge of the world was stored, has inspired writers as well as librarians throughout history. Our knowledge of the real ancient Library of Alexandria is to say the least patchy, the primary sources being few, and mostly repeating other sources, now lost, or too distant to be able to be sure of. If we are going to heed Sagan’s warning, however, we must be sure of the true reason for the library’s demise.
 
There were in fact two libraries in ancient Alexandria, The Mouseion and the Serapeum, or the Inner and Outer Libraries. One of our sources about the Alexandrian Library is the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who, in his History (written around AD 380-390) also brings together the two key facts: that there was a massive library, and that it was destroyed.
 
But while the fact that the library failed to exist beyond the classical period is unquestioned, exactly why is less clear.
 
Ammianus Marcellinus thought that it happened when the city was sacked under Caesar, and Caesar himself reported the burning of Alexandria as an accidental consequence of his war against his great rival Pompey, in 48–47 BCE. Ships bringing enemy troops had been docked in the harbor, close to a series of warehouses, and Caesar’s troops torched them. In the conflagration that followed, a number of nearby buildings were destroyed. Following the city’s instructions that all incoming ships should be searched for books, which were required to be copied for the library, it is feasible that these seized books had been temporarily stored in the dockside warehouses. In this account, material damage was done to the collections of the library, but it was not its end. This ties in with the account of the geographer Strabo who did much of his own research some decades after the events of 48–47 BCE using sources from the library.
 
The Serapeum seems to have suffered a fire at some point around CE 181 and again in 217 but was rebuilt, although there is no indication whether the fire affected the library or just the temple complex. In CE 273 the Emperor Aurelian recaptured Alexandria after it had been occupied by the insurgent rebellion of Palmyra, destroying the palace complex and almost certainly inflicting damage on the library, but if this is a true record, then it is possible that the Library of the Serapeum may have outlived the Mouseion.
 
The writer Edward Gibbon, in his classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire dismissed another theory, that the destruction could be blamed on one of the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, Caliph Omar. This version of events had been reported by some early Christian writers, including an evocative story of the scrolls being fuel for the thousands of hot baths in the city. The Enlightenment skeptic was scathing in his analysis of that account: it was scarcely logical that the Caliph would burn Jewish and Christian religious books, which were also considered holy texts in Islam.
 
For Gibbon, the Library of Alexandria was one of the great achievements of the classical world and its destruction—which he concludes was due to a long and gradual process of neglect and growing ignorance—was a symbol of the barbarity that overwhelmed the Roman Empire, allowing civilization to leach away the ancient knowledge that was being re-encountered and appreciated in his own day. The fires were major incidents in which many books were lost, but the institution of the library disappeared more gradually both through organizational neglect and through the gradual obsolescence of the papyrus scrolls themselves.
 
Alexandria is, in that telling, a cautionary tale of the danger of creeping decline, through the underfunding, low prioritization and general disregard for the institutions that preserve and share knowledge: libraries and archives. Today, we must remember that war is not the only way an Alexandria can be destroyed.
 

The long history of attacks on knowledge includes not just deliberate violence—during the Holocaust or China’s Cultural Revolution, for example—but also the wilful deprioritization of support for these institutions, which we are witnessing in Western societies today. The impact that these various acts of destruction of libraries and archives has had on communities and on society as a whole is profound. Communities in places like Iraq and Mali have seen Islamic extremists target libraries for attack, and in the U.K. over the past decade, more than 800 public libraries have closed through lack of support from local Government. Today, with major technology companies taking control of the archive as it moves into the digital realm, the complacency of society has meant lack of regulation, control and privacy surrounding the most powerful bodies of knowledge ever seen.
 
“There is no political power without power over the archive,” wrote Jacques Derrida, the great French critic, in his classic work Archive Fever. The power of the “legend” of Alexandria prompted the creation of a new Library of Alexandria in the modern Egyptian city, which was opened in 2002 with a focus on storing and preserving digital information. That Library is still operating today, together with one of the best Schools of Library and Information science in the region. The hum of its vast server farm has replaced the quiet concentration of the scholars who worked in the institution of the classical period. But even the newest, most advanced libraries need to be treasured and respected if the knowledge they contain is to survive.
 
The Story of the Library of Alexandria Is Mostly a Legend, But the Lesson of Its Burning Is Still Crucial Today. By Richard Ovenden. Time , November 17, 2020.

 

Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden discusses the long history of the destruction of libraries and archives, ranging from the ancient world to the era of cyberwarfare. His talk will highlight both the social importance of preserving knowledge, as well as the role of librarians and archivists who have risked and even lost their own lives to protect the knowledge in their care. Online Event supported by Friends of the Bodleian. Bodleian Libraries,   September 29, 2020. 

It must be the case that Richard Ovenden’s new work was completed before the world found itself in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, so some chapters in Burning the Books seem eerily prescient. “The idea that information must be diffused and made available to the public if government was to be open to correction also began to be understood,” he writes of 17th-century England, when prominent intellectuals promoted the collection of social statistics to stabilise governmental structures and ensure the prosperity and contentment of the population. He goes on to address the Bills of Mortality for London, documents listing the number of deaths and analysing the causes of them. As the diaries of Samuel Pepys confirm, citizens used that information to manage and modify their own behaviour – most notably in 1665 and 1666, when London was in the grip of the bubonic plague. “This end of the town every day grows very bad of the plague,” Pepys wrote on 29 June, 1665. “The Mortality bill is come to 267, which is about 90 more than the last: and of these, but four in the City – which is a great blessing to us.”
 
So Pepys, at home in the City precincts of Seething Lane, felt the blessing of relative safety; as perhaps did citizens far from the East Midlands as they saw Leicester go into local lockdown in late June after a spike in coronavirus cases there. Our safety depends not only on our exposure to the virus but on how much we trust the information supplied to us, and how we are able to access that information. In these first decades of the 21st century, we seem beset by a generalised corruption of information, in part because we are so overwhelmed by the stuff. In a typical minute last year, Ovenden writes, around the world 18.1 million text messages were sent, 87,500 people were tweeting, and 390,000 apps were downloaded. How to tell information from “fake news” is an urgent problem brought even more sharply into focus by a pandemic that has already cost more than 900,000 lives across the globe. But as Ovenden shows in this wide-ranging and informative book, questions concerning the preservation and dissemination of information, the wars over who controls it, saves it, destroys it, are nothing new.
 
Ovenden has been Librarian at the Bodleian in Oxford since 2014: he is the 25th holder of that title. The library was founded by Sir Thomas Bodley (his “raffish charm”, writes Ovenden, is apparent in the 16th-century portrait that hangs in the new Weston Library) following the destruction wrought by the Reformation; Bodley’s contemporary Francis Bacon described the library as “an ark to save learning from the deluge”.
 
The Reformation was “one of the worst periods in the history of knowledge”, Ovenden writes; hundreds of thousands of books were destroyed as the monasteries and religious orders that held them were dissolved. Bodley intended his library to be accessible not just to members of the university but to “the whole republic of the learned”. He tried to future-proof his creation by entering into an agreement with the Stationers’ Company of London, meaning every book published by its members would be deposited in the new library.
 
The destruction not only of literary treasures but of vital records did not stop in the 16th century, of course, and nor did it begin then. Ovenden opens with the wrecking of the great Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh in the 7th century BCE, and his tale stretches right into the present. The book had its beginnings in a piece Ovenden wrote for the Financial Times about the Windrush scandal – the revelation that landing cards documenting the arrival into the UK of immigrants from Caribbean countries in the years after the Second World War had been destroyed by the Home Office, leading to the wrongful deportation of at least 83 British citizens. The destruction of the documents, Ovenden wrote, “indicates at best a failure of sound management inside the Home Office, and at worst a culture of callous disregard towards certain categories of Britons”. The preservation of knowledge, as Ovenden reminds us in Burning the Books, is vital to an open, healthy society, “as indeed it has been since the beginning of our civilisation”.
 
Perhaps the reader’s chronological distance might prevent them from being too cut up about the fate of Ashurbanipal’s clay tablets, but as the book moves along it is impossible not to be startled and horrified by what one might too easily call wanton destruction: Ovenden’s whole point, however, is that most of the time the destruction is not wanton but purposeful, a vigorous effort to erase culture. The “Paper Brigade” was a group of Jewish intellectuals in Vilnius in Lithuania who were forced by the Nazis to dismantle the Strashun Library, perhaps the first Jewish public library in the world. Led by the scholar Herman Kruk – once director of the Grosser Library in Warsaw – the group sabotaged the Nazi effort as best they could, and managed to smuggle thousands of books, and tens of thousands of printed documents, into the Vilna ghetto where they could be hidden. But that was, and is, a drop in the ocean: as Ovenden notes, it is estimated that in the dozen years of Nazi dominance, from 1933 to 1945, more than 100 million books were destroyed.
 
Perhaps even more than libraries, national archives stitch the fabric of a society together. Ovenden contrasts what happened to the archives of East Germany’s state security organisation, the Stasi, with those of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party after his overthrow in 2003. After the Berlin Wall came down, the Stasi’s archives remained in Berlin and have now been accessed by more than seven million people; the Ba’ath Party archives were taken from Iraq and are now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This was meant to be a short-term arrangement, but as yet the documents have not been returned to Iraq. “Has the continued absence of the Iraqi archives prolonged the healing of that society?” Ovenden asks. He provides no easy answers; the strength of this book is in the questions it raises. He devotes a whole chapter to the challenges digital memory and archiving present, and whether we are in danger of handing over responsibility for cultural memory to companies such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google.
 
Ovenden grew up in Kent: his passion for libraries was conceived in Deal’s public library. He reminds us that it was only in 1964 that the Public Libraries and Museums Act made it a duty for local authorities to provide libraries; in the age of austerity, the system is in trouble. In 2018-19, there were 3,583 public libraries in the UK compared with 4,356 in 2009-10: 773 have closed. “There is nothing more to the credit of a library than that every man finds in it what he seeks,” wrote the 17th-century French librarian and scholar Gabriel Naudé. Richard Ovenden is a passionate advocate of that view: despite the tales of wrecking and pillage that fill his book, it’s clear that he is by nature an optimist, calling out to the better angels of our nature to fight for the preservation of what makes us who we are.
 
The history of book burning. By Erica Wagner. New Statesman, September 16, 2020.
 

It’s both amusing and a little bit touching that a lifelong librarian has written a book in which librarians are the heroes. None wears a cape; they do not cast aside their owlish spectacles and transform themselves into muscled hulks. Rather, it is their very earnestness, diligence and scholarship – along with their willingness to risk their lives to protect and preserve the truth – that has the reader cheering them on.

 These are the stars of Burning the Books, a deeply engaging and timely “history of knowledge under attack” by Richard Ovenden, who since 2014 has rejoiced in the title of Bodley’s Librarian: meaning that he is the 25th person to run the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. He starts with ancient Mesopotamia and ends in Facebook and Twitter, detailing specific episodes rather than attempting a comprehensive history, charting the apparently never-ending threat to the recorded past. He dissects the methods and motives of those who have sought to burn, bury or delete the texts through which the story of the human race – its wanderings, discoveries and longings – has been documented. But he is careful to lavish special attention, the admiration of a kindred spirit, on those who stood in the way.

 We learn of the library staff who, along with the people of Sarajevo – Serbs, Croats, Jews and Muslims – formed a human chain to rescue books when the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina came under deliberate and sustained artillery fire from Serbian military positions in August 1992. Ovenden notes that the shells aimed at the library were incendiaries, “designed to raise fire rapidly on impact”. The librarians tried to save what they could from the burning building, but it was no good: Serb marksmen picked off the firefighters, even targeting them with anti-aircraft guns. “Ray Bradbury reminded us in 1953 of the temperature at which paper burns – Fahrenheit 451 – but an entire library takes a long time to be destroyed,” Ovenden writes. In Sarajevo’s case, it took three days. A Bosnian poet said that afterwards ash from the burnt volumes fell on the city like “black birds”.

 The Serbs’ purpose was not mysterious. “Cleansing” present-day Bosnia of Muslims was not enough; they sought to erase the evidence of a past Muslim presence in the country. Beyond the main library in Sarajevo, Serb forces targeted local archives, destroying land registries with particular zeal. Gravestones were bulldozed too, as if “to eradicate even the suggestion that Muslims had been buried in Bosnian soil”. Those who resisted understood what was at stake. Ovenden quotes the Sarajevo fire chief, Kenan Slinic, who when asked why he and his brigade were risking their lives to save books and paper replied, “Because I was born here and they are burning a part of me.”

 Inevitably, the notion of book-burning jolts a very specific memory in the European imagination and this book opens with it. It describes the May night in 1933 when 40,000 watched a bonfire on Unter den Linden, Berlin’s main street, as the flames devoured thousands of books written by Jews and others deemed un-German, most of them gay or communist or both. “You do well to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past,” Josef Goebbels told the book-burners. “This is a strong, great and symbolic deed.”

 That Berlin bonfire does indeed stand as a symbol, or perhaps more accurately, as a harbinger. For where books led, people would follow. The Third Reich destroyed six million Jewish lives and, by Ovenden’s estimate, 100m books. As with the shelling of the Sarajevo library, this was no collateral damage: the Nazis established a team whose sole task was the seizure and, usually, destruction of Jewish texts.

 Yet here too, Ovenden has a heroic tale to tell. He devotes a chapter to the extraordinary story of the ‘Paper Brigade’, the dozen Jews corralled in the ghetto of Vilna – now Vilnius in Lithuania – who were forced to assist the Nazis as they collected, sorted and shipped off Jewish books and manuscripts. (The Nazi plan was to save key texts that might be used in a future Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question – a sort of Museum of the Extinct Jewish People.) The Paper Brigade used their position not to assist the Nazi endeavour but to thwart it, rescuing and hiding whatever they could, whether handwritten letters received from Leo Tolstoy or drawings by Marc Chagall. It is a story of ingenuity and deep courage. A postwar postscript yields yet another hero: the Lithuanian librarian who had to save these Jewish literary treasures from a new threat of destruction, this time from the Soviets. Dr Antanas Ulpis stashed the documents in a church, even stuffing them inside the pipes of the organ, where they remained for four decades.

 Still, Ovenden is clear that the 20th-century tyrants’ desire to destroy knowledge was part of a long tradition. He describes Henry VIII’s war on the monasteries and the trashing of precious books that came with it. Tens of thousands of texts were burned or broken up and sold as scrap, as the monarch set about ridding the kingdom of the taint of Rome. Similar violence was done to the written word across Reformation Europe.

 In Ovenden’s telling, it’s the ideological desire to erase a contrary view or a despised people that is the usual source of danger to books. But it’s not the only one. He recounts the familiar but still gripping story of Franz Kafka, who ordered his work burnt, only for his executor to defy his wishes; and of Philip Larkin, whose request that his diaries be “burned unread” was scrupulously honoured. He also casts a sceptical eye over Ted Hughes’s decision to destroy some of the papers of Sylvia Plath, suggesting that Hughes was trying to protect his own reputation rather than hers. He detects a similar self-serving motivation in the conduct of British colonial administrators, who as they left the territories they had ruled incinerated the records that might have incriminated them.

 The sound of a warning vibrates through this book. Ovenden sets us straight about the great library of Alexandria: it was not destroyed by fire, but rather neglect. He calls it a “cautionary tale of the danger of creeping decline, through the underfunding, low prioritisation and general disregard for the institutions that preserve and share knowledge”.

 But there is a contemporary menace greater even than complacency. Ovenden calls it the “digital deluge”: the sheer abundance of material that exists online. His chief worry is that so much data is stored in private hands, held by the tech giants of Google and Facebook. Since their purpose is commerce rather than the public good, they can hardly be trusted to act as custodians of human knowledge. He writes less about what might be as great a threat: the formats that grow obsolete and therefore illegible to future generations or the encrypted technologies that encourage policymakers and others to conduct their conversations via a medium that leaves no trace for posterity.

 Above all, this is a book that takes a nightmare that haunts many of us – the notion of the past erased – and confirms that it is no fiction but rather a recurring reality. In the process, Ovenden stays true to his calling, reminding us that libraries and librarians are the keepers of humankind’s memories: without them, we don’t know who we are.

 Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden review – knowledge under attack. By Jonathan Freedland. The Guardian , September 10, 2020.

Gemma and Lawrence chat to Richard Ovenden OBE, author of Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack.  Radical Science,  the Science Disrupt podcast.  October 1, 2020. 

A third of the way into his rich and meticulous 3,000 year history of knowledge and all the ways it may be preserved (or not), Richard Ovenden casually mentions that he and his wife once had to clear the house of a family member – a job that involved deciding which letters and diaries should be saved, and which, ultimately, destroyed. As he notes, such decisions are taken everywhere, every day, with few consequences. But occasionally, the fate of such documents can have profound consequences for culture, particularly if the deceased person had a public life. Think of Byron’s publisher, John Murray, tearing up and then burning the manuscript of his memoirs at his house in Albemarle Street; of Philip Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, feeding his diaries, sheet by sheet, into a Hull University shredder.

 
At this point, I had to stop reading Ovenden’s book for a moment, to picture the author going through the dressing-table drawers of, say, his elderly aunt. I imagine this would be an oddly impressive sight, for by day he is Bodley’s librarian (the most senior position at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford). If there’s anyone you might want to read your love letters after your death, it’s probably him; as Burning the Books reveals on every page, not only is he careful, diligent and wise, he also knows what to leave out, and what to keep in – and it’s this quality, above all, that makes his book so remarkable. Its sweep is quite astonishing and yet, amazingly, his narrative runs to just 320 pages.
 
Francis Bacon described the creation by Sir Thomas Bodley of the Bodleian in the 1590s as “an ark to save learning from the deluge” – the deluge in question being the Reformation. Ovenden’s somewhat more diminutive ark, also written at a time of huge political and economic strife, attempts to save the concept of the library itself, something it achieves not through polemic – though his book comes with a handy, cut-out-and-keep five-point plea for their continued existence – but by telling stories. He begins with the library of King Ashurbanipal, the institution at the heart of the Assyrian empire, a realm already centuries old by the time the Greek historian Xenophon gazed at the spot in Mesopotamia where the ancient city of Nineveh had once stood (in the 19th century, 28,000 clay tablets were retrieved from what remained of this library, artefacts that represent a revolution in the documentation of knowledge). After this, he then leaps on, crossing continents, cantering through the centuries.

 
Here is John Leland, traversing Tudor England, enabling us to glimpse the contents of the monastic libraries shortly before they were destroyed by Henry VIII. Here is the burning of the library of Louvain University in 1914, in what is now Belgium, by the invading German army. And here is the National Library in Sarajevo, aflame for three days in 1992, due to incendiaries fired by Serbian militia. By learning what was lost, and how, and why, we come to see how vitally indispensable libraries and archives are; to grasp some, if not all, of the ways in which they inform and sustain us.
 
However, I was most forcefully struck by the way that history repeats itself. The burning of Sarajevo’s library took place less than 50 years after the end of the second world war, when the Nazis embarked on one of the most concerted eradications of books ever to take place (it’s chastening, to put it mildly, to read that a German librarian, Wolfgang Herrmann, was among those who compiled a helpful list of banned authors); and even now, the ruination goes on. The libraries of the Zaydi community in Yemen are a unique feature of its cultural life – Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam, has a long and open-minded intellectual tradition – and are currently caught in the crossfire of its grim civil war.
 
And then there are the national archives of modern Iraq, a significant part of which have survived, thanks in large part to the extraordinary heroism of Kanan Makiya, an expatriate academic whose “obsession” with them brought him first to store some of these records in his parents’ house in Baghdad, and then to ensure their removal to a safe place. This is a long, complicated story, but it’s worth reading. As Ovenden quietly notes, archives are central to social order, to the ordering of history, and to the expression of national and cultural identity. In the case of Iraq, a country still mired in chaos, they’re crucial, in particular, to understanding the rise and fall of the Ba’ath party – and thus, they offer, perhaps, some modicum of hope. One day, the Iraqis will have the time and space to ask the deepest questions about what befell their country between 1968, when the Ba’athists assumed power, and the present day. Some of the answers they need will surely be found in this miraculous collection, now housed in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California.
 
Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden review – the libraries we have lost. By Rachel Cooke. The Guardian , August 31, 2020. 

Cold Discovery

What is lost when we “watch Netflix” rather than shows and “listen to Spotify” rather than songs?

Books increasingly don’t have covers: The rapid rise of tablets and e-readers has led to more books being read on screens, which de-emphasize the cover as both a visual identifier and a physical delimiter. A cover once represented a book’s tangible individuality, its discreteness. Now, on screens, covers persist as vestigial rectangular images, superfluously ornamenting search results or PDFs. Does that shift in emphasis mean readers engage more directly with texts themselves, rather than judging books by their covers as the cliché warns? Fifty Shades of Grey and self-help books boomed in popularity on post-cover devices. Are we finally free to read what we really want, safe in the knowledge that no one can judge us?

Self-consciousness about what we’re reading isn’t the only thing likely to vanish with book covers. Beyond letting readers publicly signal their identities, covers are part of a whole regime of organizing information and space that is now in danger of disappearing. While the design of libraries and bookstores prioritizes the coherent visual display of book covers and spines so that people can navigate collections and find the singular physical objects the covers signify, the endlessly rewritable surface of the screen dispenses with that arrangement. Screens foreground the digital platform itself as singular, and thereby assimilate any particular text into the theoretically unlimited succession of information they can display. The distinct identity that a particular cover conveys has been traded for a standardizing consistency that unifies everything displayed on a screen as data flowing in a broader stream.

Music has undergone a similar transition: While album covers still survive as onscreen companions to digital listening, they have moved from the center of the experience to its periphery. Like the envelope icon that still represents email, album covers have shrunken into stylized reminders of what the technology you’re currently using is making obsolete. Covers aren’t essential for discovering content on platforms. Their images merely decorate the interfaces of menus, icons, and search bars that enable navigation; their original purpose has been overtaken by the algorithmic logic that platforms use to organize and deliver content. That software, more than screens or any other hardware, mediates information access and discovery.

If covers can be construed as misleading or superficial wrappers, platform algorithms are hardly more honest. They introduce their own form of deception, feeding users content according to biases and affordances that are frequently opaque, obfuscated, concealed, or misleadingly represented. At their most transparent, streaming services like Spotify reductively mirror your past choices back to you; Netflix, however, has gone as far as to covertly recontextualize movie screen shots for its menu displays based on individual viewers’ data, in order to entice those viewers to watch more — an algorithmic subversion of the physical cover that is slightly different for everyone.

These dynamics highlight how, on platforms like Spotify and Netflix, specific artists and their works are not the objects offered to the users for consumption — a focus that covers supported. Instead, the object of consumption is the platforms themselves. More than watching certain shows, we watch Netflix; more than listening to songs, we listen to Spotify; more than reading particular books, we read our Kindles. We can choose not to pay attention to the details beyond that. Our peers frequently don’t know what we’re watching, listening to, or reading, but we don’t necessarily know either.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan argues that every medium contains another pre-existing medium as its content: Speech is the content of writing, while writing is the content of print. Print, along with music and video, has become the content of another medium, the internet and its digital formats. Movies and television, in the aggregate, have become the content of Netflix, so when we watch video on Netflix, we are watching “movies and television” at a less differentiated level of abstraction.

When we step into these universal content libraries, we rely less upon crude clues like covers for navigation and give ourselves over to an environment that offers to do almost everything for us, if we’ll just let it. With nearly any imaginable book, movie, or song close at hand and fewer of the traditional forces that push us to choose one over another, the context provided by those limitations fades and the environment itself gains corresponding prominence — at the expense of any specific thing within it.

More than a mere aesthetic shift, this transfer of activity from the physical world to the digital thrusts us into a landscape we haven’t yet learned to navigate, one in which familiar cultural dynamics no longer operate as we expect. Traditional sources of shared meaning and emotional well-being, cultivated in human communities for millennia, fail to translate to these new environments as individuals’ behavior becomes less visible. The euphoria of endless choice and convenience is counterbalanced by a sense of anomie, in which things that used to matter — like taste — don’t seem to anymore and lack an obvious substitute. Meanwhile, the platforms themselves, in their totalizing ambition, take advantage of our disorientation and choose behavior for us.

As Netflix’s cover-image algorithm unintentionally demonstrates, covers don’t just passively represent the content they contain. For centuries, the cover has functioned as the gateway to a work, priming us to receive what’s within.

In the Middle Ages, when manuscripts did not yet have formal titles or distinctive covers, that priming role was fulfilled by the text’s incipit — the first few words that served as an identifying label for the work. Before the printing press, concise titles weren’t necessary to identify manuscripts, as most people owned only a few and could differentiate them well enough by their opening lines. Covers of books, similarly, were made by hand and not standardized. With the advent of the printing press, standardized titles and covers became necessary amid a sudden influx of books to provide context where the incipit had previously sufficed. Those covers and titles linked books to their surrounding environment, not only making them searchable on shelves and in libraries, but creating the very need for shelves and libraries in the first place.

The cover helps to situate a work’s accessibility; it is “infrastructure,” as Sanford Kwinter writes in an essay for Harvard Design magazine:

                                                         a book’s cover (or to be precise, its jacket) belonged traditionally not to the book itself but rather to the retail or public environment in which a book is deployed and displayed, in which it claims its place among other books, and in relation to the public eye and mind of the citizen-reader. The cover was therefore conceived as a material part of the extended urban infrastructure within which it was intended to operate, was devised to serve as a communicative but also commutative and conductive surface.

Far more than a container or shell for content, the cover is an interface between that content and human society, the intermediate layer that positions the information in the world.

The definition of infrastructure is often uselessly broad and abstract: One early 19th-century definition  was “the installations that form the basis for any operation or system.” But another approach is to view infrastructure as context — that which establishes a relationship between one thing and other things. Infrastructure creates adjacency where it wouldn’t otherwise exist, frequently in the form of a physical connection. For instance, the massive Denver International Airport, opened in 1995, put an otherwise relatively remote city at the doorstep of the world, replacing a small regional airport with a major international hub. Urban street systems link houses, stores, and workplaces, defining neighborhoods and cities as coherent entities. Airports and roads, however, are only the most tangible examples of infrastructure. Organizational schema like geographic coordinates or the Dewey Decimal System are also infrastructure, as is the internet and everything it comprises, at a global scale.

If covers are infrastructure, what adjacencies do they create? They not only make it possible to find a particular printed book or vinyl record in physical space; they also organize the very existence of spaces dedicated to perusing that media. Record stores depend upon covers, as surely as a city depends on roads. Each governs our ability to explore.

A physical cover is a specific analog protocol for engaging with a particular physical object; it’s akin to hailing a taxi by waving your hand in the air rather than ordering a car through a ride-hailing app. Both covers and taxi hailing require being in a specific place at a specific time and making a visual connection. If an app like Uber eliminates the need for mutual eye contact between taxi driver and passenger, thus expanding the range of possible driver-rider matches by orders of magnitude, then media platforms effect a comparable expansion, in the size of their libraries as well as in users’ ability to browse them. In fact, the enhanced browsability permits the expansion. Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon offer far more products than consumers could navigate without the aid of relational databases and screen-based interfaces.

To make these enormous catalogs navigable, platforms reconstitute some of the dynamics and limitations of physical shopping. Algorithms use keyword searches and other data inputs, including correlations with millions of other users’ queries, to shrink the scope of our potential browsing from effectively infinite to something human-scaled and closer in variety to that of a brick-and-mortar store. A manageable array of images (often covers) then appears on the screen, letting us browse the way we always have. But because this array is instantaneously generated rather than predetermined by physical inventory, it requires a different kind of logistical backdrop. Platforms are all-encompassing, in ambition if not yet in practice; the screen, able to display any image immediately, is the ideal endpoint of such a massive system, even if it can only display the tiniest fraction of what’s available at a given moment. The platform’s huge selection doesn’t overwhelm us because we believe more choice is good for us whether we can handle it or not. Regardless, we never have to face the blinding totality of that variety all at once.

Digital platforms are thus a more refined, rationalized, and totalizing kind of infrastructure. Because they accomplish their specific goals so effectively — efficiency, legibility, and breadth of selection — they tend to rapidly replace their analog predecessors once they appear. When we engage with these platforms, however briefly, they envelop us with their logic and their norms.

Legible, contextualized environments are something humans deeply desire. Urban theorist Kevin Lynch, in his 1960 book The Image of the City, called this “imageability.” He argued that “a vivid and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image, plays a social role.” Such a setting provides “the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication,” which in turn “gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security.” So a bookstore, from this point of view, is not just a place to find books, but a place to confirm a sense of belonging, one rooted in a shared sense of how things are categorized and organized.

Platforms deplete those forms of imageability that we are used to. They are effective, to an unprecedented degree, at placing global-scale variety and informational agency at their users’ fingertips, but this often fails to foster “emotional security” as we know it. Though we spend much of our waking lives in a state interpenetrated by the analog and digital — checking Twitter at the dinner table with friends or family; sharing a day at the beach on Instagram; streaming Netflix movies while falling asleep — we still value that stabilizing power and imageability of physical space, which offers familiar signposts to help us navigate the world as an unprecedented flood of information rises and swirls around us. We may adapt and get better at reconciling the two domains, but we haven’t yet internalized all the assumptions and instincts that digital landscapes require. The displacement of the analog by the digital remains particularly disorienting (or “disruptive”) as software “unbundles” and “bundles” the world.

A world increasingly pervaded by this platform logic might resemble the world Chenoe Hart imagined in speculating on the future of self-driving cars (another digitally oriented infrastructure): “Once physical locations are rendered as abstract coordinates in a user interface, they effectively become arbitrary, as interchangeable as the retail spaces of big-box stores. The experience of inhabiting any particular interior space might become decoupled from its existence within a specific place, free from the baggage of associated historical and geographic context.” As self-driving cars might one day make locations more interchangeable, streaming services have made content more interchangeable, by abstracting it as instantly queryable data.

Digital platforms introduce a new type of context that relies on branding, platform unity, and network topology more than geographic proximity. To software, locations are just spatial coordinates separated by quantifiable distance (as demonstrated by geographically situated apps like Uber or Yelp). The existence of adjacent, unrelated things whose fates become intertwined by their coincidental proximity is a foreign concept within relational databases, where any two things can become adjacent given the right query.

Platforms posit space without imageability, or geography without adjacency. Inhabitants of that space, not grounded within it by any legible organizing principle, nor able to identify with any specific place above any other, lose that fundamental source of shared meaning along with the emotional security that it fosters. We may recoil at the world Hart describes and affirm our desire to hold on to geographic context, even though we dip in and out of such a world constantly via our phones.

Earlier versions of the internet, which still survive in residual pockets, once replicated the adjacency of the physical world more faithfully: “Surfing the web” involved bouncing between personal websites and blogs linked together by webrings and blogrolls, a structure that encouraged adventures down unplanned rabbit holes. In the past five years, though, Google and Facebook gained direct influence over the majority of internet traffic, and computer-generated certainty has encroached upon human-generated randomness. In this environment, adjacency is replaced by a software-driven prescriptiveness that bypasses the peripheral and unrelated. “Rabbitholing” now refers to YouTube’s algorithmic suggestion of increasingly inflammatory content, a top-down phenomenon still influenced by individual agency but shorter on serendipity. On Google and Facebook there are fewer happy accidents; our proximity-derived relationships give way to a quantum entanglement that knows no distance.

We still value serendipity, though — on the internet as well as on city streets — as a form of randomness that, by definition, lies beyond the scope of a system’s rules or objectives. As systems governed by explicit rules and objectives increase their influence over daily life, threatening to radicalize us in strange rabbit holes or just sell us things we don’t really want, serendipity is a way to be something beyond just a user.

The replacement of serendipity with algorithmic flow affects how we discover and engage with art. The same contextual shift that makes covers less important also demotes individual works and artists to a lower position on the value chain. Again, the phrases “watching Netflix” and “listening to Spotify,” as opposed to watching or listening to something specific on them, suggest that these platforms denature their content and assimilate its identity into their own. While a book cover wrapped an individual work — an independently defined, freestanding unit of content — a platform interface wraps the entire collection of works that users can access through it. In the process, that collection becomes a slurry of fungible content that fuels the platform. Volume supersedes specific quality. It matters less which movies and shows are on Netflix, and more how many are on it. Past a certain threshold, most users can live without any particular movie. Platform content thus becomes raw input flowing into a factory toward a destiny as a single, homogenous product.

No form embodies the platform’s ascendance as well as Spotify’s fundamental organizing structure, the playlist. Playlists can be handmade by another person or algorithmically generated from one’s own past listening behavior. In either case, the unifying theme is no longer the artists who made the music. The juxtaposition of artists on a playlist might be a savvy act of intentional curation or a random digital output, and Spotify doesn’t necessarily want you to distinguish between the two. By making both equivalent, the platform gains relevance at the artists’ and users’ expense. As Liz Pelly notes in an essay for the Baffler, “It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll.” At the same time, the identity of content is unbundled from its makers and curators and rebundled with the brand of the platform that streams it. Like the placeless spaces the self-driving car will create, Spotify minimizes friction and frees songs of contextual baggage so they can exist anywhere.

Services like Netflix and Spotify have embraced the not-quite-familiar context that digital environments offer as a replacement for physical adjacency. Despite whatever disorientation they induce, those services offer some compensating comforts: The self-expression of owning a record collection and the elitism it once enabled give way to an egalitarian tropics in which everyone theoretically listens to a bit of everything and nobody’s taste is entirely legible. We can safely read Fifty Shades of Grey without judgment. The algorithmic curator we each personally train validates our preferences by reflecting them back to us, allowing us, as Rob Horning writes, to consume our identities rather than perform them.

We’ve only just begun to assimilate these platform landscapes into our understanding of the world. Kevin Lynch believed that an intelligible physical environment — the kind that Netflix and Spotify have left behind — could, at its best, provide a foundation for “the symbols and collective memories of group communication.” Imageability guards against solipsism, providing cues that force us to acknowledge a reality not specifically tailored to our own preferences and enabling a joy beyond what individual experience alone can bring. At their worst, platforms threaten to send each of us down our own decontextualized rabbit hole, weakening collective narratives and exposing us to active attacks on what Renee DiResta calls “society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology.”

While many lament the transition to a digital realm that doesn’t naturally accommodate those familiar communal symbols and many others uncritically embrace it, a healthy synthesis of the two positions is possible and even necessary. We can acknowledge the widespread arrival of a new technological medium and learn how to create shared meaning within it that is as robust as more established forms of meaning, though not subject to its constraints. This will likely require different platforms, norms, and behaviors than those we have now. Lynch coined the concept of imageability as it was receding from automobile-stricken urban environments. We may need more theorists like him to help us recognize new forms of digital imageability, ones worth preserving and developing before they too start slipping away.

Cold Discovery. By Drew Austin.  Real Life , December 10   , 2018