Some ways of looking at books - by Anna

I moved house. Every time I move, the hardest thing to transport is my books; there are more of them each year, and even when I get rid of a few—I give them to friends or leave them around the university—they make for heavy suitcases and boxes which I lift clumsily, one by one, onto the bus. In my new house there are no bookshelves. I move the bed into a different corner of my room and arrange my books along the edge of my desk; the rest of them go on the windowsill or are piled up on a chest of drawers. Whenever I move, I think of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”, which begins as simply as possible: Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus. Ja. Benjamin said that modern life was captured more accurately in the minor forms of writing, “in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards” rather than “the pretentious, universal gesture of the book”. I suppose that the minor forms I unpack from my boxes and suitcases (four or five postcards from friends; a ticket to see Orlando at the Gar

I moved house. Every time I move, the hardest thing to transport is my books; there are more of them each year, and even when I get rid of a few—I give them to friends or leave them around the university—they make for heavy suitcases and boxes which I lift clumsily, one by one, onto the bus. In my new house there are no bookshelves. I move the bed into a different corner of my room and arrange my books along the edge of my desk; the rest of them go on the windowsill or are piled up on a chest of drawers. Whenever I move, I think of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”, which begins a