Hot library smut

As libraries gradually disappear in our society, giving way to resource and information centres, we should at least understand the value of what we are losing.

In a speech given in 1962, the Malian writer Amadou Hampaté Bâ said that when an old person dies, a library burns. Through this dictum, he meant to emphasise the enormity of the loss of each individual life. But he was also talking more specifically of the fragility of the knowledge and wisdom of the great scholars of Africa, which he saw as comparable in preciousness to, say, the library of Timbuktu.

When I was a child, Timbuktu was a word for a place in the middle of nowhere, as far from civilisation as Kalamazoo. So to claim that something was as precious as the library at Timbuktu wouldn’t amount to much at all. It was only when I came to know a bit more about the world that I found out that the libraries of Timbuktu contain manuscript collections as splendid as those of the ancient library of Alexandria, collections that are now slowly being opened to the world outside Timbuktu.

Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s dictum says that when a person of wisdom dies, a library disappears from the world. So a sage like the Malian Dogon master Ogotemmêli is understood on the model of a great and beautiful library. But the dictum works the other way too: a library is like a person of wisdom and knowledge and beauty.

Perhaps the best way of getting a clear sense of the meaning of this analogy between a wise old person and a library is to visit the website Hot Library Smut. The website features photographs from Candida Höfer’s book Libraries, picturing libraries that invite stillness and contemplative wonder, and that feed the hunger for both learning and beauty. To grasp even more fully what Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s analogy is getting at, I recommend taking a tour of your local civic or school or university library after visiting Hot Library Smut. Somehow it doesn’t have quite the same meaning to say that when an old person dies, a configurable and client-centred study space burns.