Objects that occupy space

At Crusoe’s Books, the anonymized Readersinhistory tells us of the trauma of having to get rid of their library because the university he/she works for needs the space for something else. Why they can’t take just them all home and thus postpone the awful decision is not made clear — maybe there are just too many. It is suggested that “Rousseau’s observation that we come to possess things only to find that they ultimately possess us has rarely felt so pertinent”. Readersinhistory writes “As a professional bibliographer, I research and write about the relationship between readers and their libraries. I spend much of my time studying how books circulate through lives, how collections are assembled, dispersed, inherited, and sometimes destroyed. Historians of reading have long understood that libraries are not merely repositories of information. They are records of intellectual development, maps of curiosity, and traces of scholarly communities. A shelf of books reveals not only what…