musing on academic libraries

Musing on the offices of senior academic staff. Wood desks, wood shelves floor to ceiling. They always had not just aging books with aging leather binding in red or gree, filling every shelf and stacked horizontally on top, but also stacks of old journals, and manila envelopes with curling yellow papers sticking out, faint pencil scrawl topics on the tabs. Stacks and stacks of them.

As a young student going into one of these offices, it seemed like it contained all the books from the past up to now. Your mind was shiny and new, and you were just starting, but this office had in it everything that had gone before, complete.

When you then get your own books and your own office, and your own books start to go yellow, you know that the academic's library only reflects a short period of time when they happened to be working - something like forty years of accumulated literature, that's all. A haphazard collection, a tiny little slice of the available literature from history. Still yellow, still venerable, would still look quite deep and historical to a shiny-minded beginner, but you know how accidental and temporary and incomplete it really is, and will always be until the day you happen to die and your collecting days happen to finish.