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Fantasies of the Library
A book that acts both as library and exhibition space, selecting, arranging, and housing texts and images, aligning itself with printed matter in the process.
Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others.
The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.”
Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others.
The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.”
160 pages, Paperback
First published September 16, 2016
About the author
Anna-Sophie Springer
8 books6 followersAnna-Sophie Springer is a curator, writer, and the co-director of K. Verlag in Berlin. Her practice merges curatorial, editorial, and artistic commitments by stimulating fluid relations among images, artifacts, and texts in order to produce new geographical, physical, and cognitive proximities, often in relation to historical archives and the book-as-exhibition. She is currently researching her PhD on the financialization of the rainforest at the Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 8, 2025
This book will unfortunately convince you that academic librarians—who in most cases need two advanced degrees to get a job—really deserve to be making that $40K/year.
This type of book is best described as “conference fodder.” It’s loaded with provocations about the colonialism immanent to the way libraries work, but you could only buy this book in the Guggenheim gift shop. It fixates on the role of libraries in the “Anthropocene”, as though the shifting social role of libraries vis a vis sites of welfare distribution were small potatoes. You get the feeling everyone involved in this book wants to permanently live in Berlin residencies, masturbating to their own post-Marxist riffs on Borges.
This is a book by and for people who have spent so much time in university libraries that the question “What if university libraries were less exclusive?” seems utterly groundbreaking to them.
This type of book is best described as “conference fodder.” It’s loaded with provocations about the colonialism immanent to the way libraries work, but you could only buy this book in the Guggenheim gift shop. It fixates on the role of libraries in the “Anthropocene”, as though the shifting social role of libraries vis a vis sites of welfare distribution were small potatoes. You get the feeling everyone involved in this book wants to permanently live in Berlin residencies, masturbating to their own post-Marxist riffs on Borges.
This is a book by and for people who have spent so much time in university libraries that the question “What if university libraries were less exclusive?” seems utterly groundbreaking to them.
November 14, 2021
Fantasies of the Library is very much in line with my research and teaching interests. I enjoyed the main essays in this volume and plan to follow up on some of the sources they referenced. Unfortunately, I found the format, with essays on the right-hand pages and interviews on the left, thought-provoking but ultimately frustrating to read. Though they are in different fonts, that amount of interruption and juxtaposition felt distracting; I kept needing to consult the table of contents to make sense of which essay I was reading.
August 20, 2017
“The silent book still journeys into time.” -JLB
Donald Judd's library in Marfa: http://juddfoundation.org/pressroomco...
Donald Judd's library in Marfa: http://juddfoundation.org/pressroomco...
September 21, 2021
excellent format, really great essays - will be returning to this one a lot
July 30, 2023
so true besties
verging on erotica
verging on erotica
September 26, 2024
This "book of the museum exhibit" doesn't work for me - I was very confused by the layout and couldn't follow the progression.
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July 29, 2025abril me lo dejó🤓🥴
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March 17, 2017027.001 F216 2016
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews