Bibliographic Imaginaries

Alain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956; 20 minute film about the Bibliothèque nationale): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs

• end of film: "And now the book marches on toward an imaginary boundary more significant in its life than passing through the looking glass. It’s no longer the same book. Before, it was part of a universal, abstract, indifferent memory where all books were equal and together basked in attention as tenderly distant as that shown by God to men. Here it’s been picked out, preferred over others. Here it’s indispensable to its reader, torn from its galaxy to feed these paper-crunching pseudo-insects, irreparably different from true insects in that each is bound to its own distinct concern. Astrophysics, physiology, theology, taxonomy, philology, cosmology, mechanics, logic, poetics, technology. Here we glimpse a future in which all mysteries are solved…when this and other universes offer up their keys to us. And this will come about simply because these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will have laid the fragments of a single secret end to end. Perhaps a secret bearing the beautiful name of 'happiness'."

Russian Constructivists

• El Lissitzky: "the handmade UNOVIS Miscellany, issued in two copies in March–April 1920,[24] and containing his manifesto on book art: "the book enters the skull through the eye not the ear therefore the pathways the waves move at much greater speed and with more intensity. if i (sic) can only sing through my mouth with a book i (sic) can show myself in various guises."" (from Wikipedia); see Vitebsk: The Life of Art, pg 122

Nunberg, The Future of the Book (1996)

Borges, "The Library of Babel" (duh)