Juan Villoro
“Organizing a library is a silent way of exercising the art of criticism,” wrote Borges. Books live in contagious density; they dialogue with each other; they benefit from other people’s discoveries, but also errors: Ptolemy, who was wrong, allows us to assess Galileo’s reason.
Every library, no matter how small, is a summary of the world. When ordering it, the most unsuccessful solution is to be guided by the volumes’ appearance: when they are aligned by color or height, we know that they have not been read. The thematic classification gives additional meaning to the volumes; It links them by currents, times, or countries, or by a hermetic sense that only deciphers who is worthy of the keys.
The books are so powerful that certain libraries have preferred to hold them prisoners. The works that deserved the attention of the Holy Inquisition were locked in cells with preventive names: “Finis terrae,” “Africa,” “Inferno.” As might be expected, they acquired the prestige of the inaccessible. “If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, its construction would have been allowed,” wrote Kafka. That boring building would have been out of temptation. Instead, banning books ended up promoting them.
In times of social networks, censorship operates less by subtraction than by abundance: there is so much information – false or true – that it is difficult to discern them. This overwhelming collection of data makes the task of establishing order even more imperative. Large public libraries, classified by generations of specialists, overwhelm the reader who does not have eternity to read them. Still, they also generate the reassuring impression that infinity can be classified.
How to order the immeasurable? If knowledge were something exclusively personal and non-transferable, libraries could have whimsical sections: “Rockets that never left,” “Ice creams that are not vanilla,” “Stars that will be discovered tomorrow.” To get rid of this attractive but not very useful arrangement, culture has relied on a guiding principle that it shares with pharmacies, where other kinds of remedies are listed according to the alphabet.
We are so used to dictionaries, telephone books, and encyclopedias following the alphabet that it is difficult to go back to when letters existed without being used to make indexes.
In the 10th century, Abdul Kassem Ismael, the vizier of Persia known as Saheb (“The Companion”), created a 117,000-volume portable library carried by 400 camels. The immense caravan followed an alphabetical sequence to be able to locate any title at any time.
The vizier was surprised not only by the excessive use of camels but by relying on the alphabet. In his study of the alphabet as technology, Ivan Illich recalls that people memorized the strict sequence of letters in the mid-twelfth century without using it to classify: “For eighty-five generations, users of the alphabet did not come up with the idea of order things according to the ABC. ” The scholastics of the 12th century transformed the art of reading by conceiving the page and structuring the book from a title, subtitles, full stops, chapter letters, summaries, and index. This “new desire for order” was made possible thanks to an efficient classification system: the alphabet. The instrument that spells the universe also orders the libraries that serve as its compendium.
Borges affirmed that every typographer is an anarchist. Umberto Eco also assured that typography could not be exercised without committing to social struggles. These assertions appeal so forcefully to the obvious that they are worth reviewing.
What happens to the people dedicated to letting the letters pass through their hands? Our language has 27 signs arranged according to ABC. However, this rigorous list only makes sense when it breaks ranks and is combined in unexpected ways. Judged from the alphabet, poetry is a riot of letters.
Typographers practically experienced creative freedom from clutter to such a degree that they chose to change the world by taking their eyes off the texts. They had been trained in the alphabet, the only gadget that works when out of order.
