When one says that they are a librarian, almost inevitably, > 90% of the time, people will express admiration that I can spend so much time reading. Not only is that silly false, most librarians rarely get the chance to deeply explore a collection other than their own (if they have one–most librarians don’t have a collection to call their own). Most library and archival professionals rarely get a chance to do library or archival research.
I’m on my second round. My first was a week in Washington DC at the Library of Congress and NARA. For the next three weeks, I will be taking a deep dive into the map collection at UWM’s AGSL.
It is a bit of a lark, a bit of a continuation of 20 years of exploring China and how it has once again become a superpower, and a more than a little bit of a homecoming to where I was an undergraduate. But more than my degree, UWM was also the first place where I was an employee of a library. And that let me know that when I had a Dada&Surrealism class, I could let myself in to the compact shelving that had some of the original publications of those movements. As much as the spoken-word person at last night’s surrealist $10, 8 ‘band’ showcase was reading out of a printed zine, the objects that were available to me to handle in the basement of Golda Meir were the original tone poetry. The original prints of scrap wood thrown onto a letterpress, then reproduced and circulated and put into the library of an urban, post-WWII expansion academic library.
I wonder where they came from? Will I track them down over the next three weeks?
Regardless, I am going to swim in the largess of librarian colleagues who were able to collect paper for 20 years longer than I did. And dig into literature that I can read fluently only in the lines and shapes, partially in words, mostly through experience.
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