How I Used Libraries

There is an old Carl Sagan clip from the show Cosmos where Carl is wandering the stacks of the New York public library to give a visualization of how many books a person can read in their lifetime if they were to do an average of one book per week.

The image is very visually compelling and stuck with me (I had originally watched the show as a child). This kind of visualization of quantities of knowledge lead me to create certain approaches to using the library when I was younger. It is maybe kind of silly, but this post is mostly intended for peoples amusement.

When I moved to a new city or a new area, one of the main things that I used to do was go check out the library in the local area. When I was working menial jobs before starting my undergrad, everyday I wasn’t working I would hangout at the library from when it was open to when it closed.

During my undergrad it was the main place I would be for 8 or 9 hours on any given day. There was even a long period of time when I didn’t have any internet in my apartment for almost an entire year, which intensified my use of the local library to an extreme.

The first thing that I would do at any new library I was planning to be in for weeks or years at a time would be to compulsively go through every single row of every single stack and look at every single book title on each shelf. Going from left to right and top to bottom in the nonfiction sections.

I would look at every single spine and locate where everything on every topic was and just kind of memorize the mapping. In sections on topics that I was closely interested in, I would know exactly where on the shelf every book on every topic was located without really needing to use a search app.

It is kind of silly, but this ritual turned into a bit of a habit, and it really helped me to explore various thoughts and ideas I was having at the time. The problem with using online catalogue-based search is that often you don’t know what it is you are looking for so you can’t figure out how to find what you want.

This could be represented by describing the difference between using a 90’s video rental store vs something like YouTube. You can wander around the video rental store and discover wonderful things that you would have never thought to search for but the same is not true of a YouTube search prompt. It generally only delivers the content that you were specifically looking for, the recommended and related videos are terrible, and there is no random discovery mechanism unless you love clickbait gibberish.

In the movie store model, there is this element of surprise that opens up new avenues of thought simply because of how the knowledge is represented visually. This is the same principle that occurs using the library stack, you are there wandering because you want to find something you weren’t expecting rather than searching for something specific and finding what you were looking for. The actual goal is to lure yourself into a place where you can develop new tastes or understand a new idea without wanting to do it consciously.

When you are a child there is a certain wonder that you have upon discovering everything for the first time and the production of novelty. This element of discovery and novelty is something that a lot of people stagnate on later in life when they really shouldn’t. Using a library or something similar can create structures that allow for the production of novelty without any special effort to set up, you just walk in and it acts as a mechanism to produce novelty for you.

It is common for people discuss the role of places in how minds form memories and create new ideas and thoughts. When you build up representations of knowledge that are grounded in visual cues like associating a thought with the specific area on a shelf on a floor of a building, it builds up your memory.

Navigating through the library stacks in this way becomes a resource for navigating thought or idea generation itself, if you can train your memory in this way. This training comes from spending time walking up and down rows in the library reading the titles of books while opening and skimming a few, until you are blue in the face.

Your mind takes specific thoughts and maps them to the ground around which they occur, if you put yourself in a situation where you can do so. This doesn’t work when you just sit at a desk in the same place everyday, you you can’t associate every thought with your desk, it just doesn’t work that way for neurological reasons that I won’t claim to understand.

I think about space in this way a lot. It is almost like a full tapestry of memory but aligned spatially. I visualize it as a hall of thoughts on the ground around me, with lots of different areas that can trigger different subconscious memories.

Over time I just learned to start mapping out everything I could in this kind of way. I would seek to design experiences that allow me to go back and forth across an area until I had created a full mental picture of it that I could go back to over and over again.

The experience carries over particularly well to visiting new cities for the first time. It is incredibly fun to build up the mental image of the spaces through a filter of what you want to see in an area without much conscious thought placed upon it. Instead just taking a few days to set aside for use building up an abstract model.

The first time I ever came to New York City was a notable example of this for me. It was the first time I had ever been to a large city, and I just walked up and down every single street available to me in almost a grid pattern. Endless walking through everything available to me that just kept going and going. I would walk for upwards of maybe 7 to 10 hours a day in heavy boots just wandering the streets for several days straight.

The point was not really to find anything exactly. The core way I’ve come to engage with cities is not usually to find anything, it is to create the map. Even now I’m not sure what I can say what I find so alluring about this other than the cities or towns themselves and their structure overall.

One way to describe this using a cliche would be to say I acted a bit like Baudelaire’s flâneur but much more obsessively centered on cataloguing. I stroll through the city but I barely engage with any of the stores. For the most part they don’t have anything that I want or desire or not enough that I’d be willing to pay anyway.

It is fundamentally neurotic to exploring new cities this way, but it really puts you in tune with the spirit of a place. To understand the layout is half of the battle, both in terms of exploring information and geography. I cherish the idea of walking up and down every single street in a flow. To be able to encode them and think of them in this mental model is really funny, and the more territory I understand or learn the more expansive is my inner map.

Maybe all this isn’t significant or useful and is just a sign that I should have studied library science or urban geography instead. I don’t think I could ever work in a library thought, library employees who reorganize shelves and throw away outdated books are the bane of my existence.