Tour the stacks and the reading rooms of libraries around the world thanks to Curious Expeditions. Seen as a collection, the library - The Library - becomes abstract. In these photographs, virtually devoid of people, The Library is a concept : it is ‘potential’ energy as opposed to kinetic energy - the latent spring in the mind, coiled but waiting there, on the infinitely high shelves. Trying to decipher the magnetism of these images - having almost nothing to with a desire to actually read all of the books in each room - but each vaulted hall a physical manifestation of the phenomenon of the figurative mental space - the freedom to be found in endless rumination.
In 1975, Joseph Feldman, a 58-year-old lawyer in New York City, was discovered to have stolen 15,000 books from the New York Public Library. He had rented an apartment specifically to store these books, and it took 20 men, 7 truckloads over 3 days to remove them all.
Books covered the stove. Books filled the bathtub and sinks.
This incident leads me to a series of inquiries, some of which will be posted here, while the others will float around in my mind like chapter headings to a long lost book buried deep within a stack piled high in an apartment somewhere in the West Village.
Breaking News
Through this door passed many thousands of books. On the way in, brought under secret cover, under coats, inside waistbands, inside satchels. Then on the way out in large cardboard boxes, headed for a truck set to rumble the lot of them back to the Public Library.
