A WORD FROM THE AUTHORMatthew Pearl, author of The Last BookaneerWhen I became serious about studyin

A WORD FROM THE AUTHORMatthew Pearl, author of The Last BookaneerWhen I became serious about studying Dante in college, I would venture down to the lowest, dampest and moldiest trenches of Harvard’s flagship library—the venerable, red-leathered 19th century Dante collection was on level “D”—not kidding—and four stories below ground. It even seemed, at least it seems in my memory, to have a red tint to the lighting. A few years after I graduated, I moved back to Cambridge with research to tack on to what I had begun in college, this time for my first novel, The Dante Club.But something at Widener Library had changed. The Dante collection (which, in part, was a byproduct of the real-life historical Dante Club) was no longer on level “D.” It had been transferred to the bright incandescent and antiseptic 1970s annex called Pusey Library, where computerized aisles wheeled open and closed to grant temporary access. When I was a sophomore, the system broke the arm of an assistant professor lingering too long with his books. The Dante aficionados, meanwhile, had reactions ranging from outrage to slight sadness about the new setting for the rare, elegant volumes.We get used to certain spots in our library spaces, certain arrangements, the location of material—all of it combines to create a sort of mental landscape to match the literary ones. Of course, libraries have to change in order to fit growing collections and adapt to new technologies of how we find and read books. In centuries past a community or university might wait until a large donation of books came in to open a library, and now we live in an age where some new libraries are bookless.My latest novel, The Last Bookaneer, in which a bookseller and collector narrates the story of book thieves, is in part a statement about the book world. It’s a world that’s often thought of as static and quaint, but in fact it’s in constant flux and filled with pitched battles, intellectual and otherwise. I’ve noticed some people find it hard to believe there would have been secret operatives out to obtain books. But there certainly were.Besides discovering the books that would eventually tempt me to try fiction writing, I also kept busy as a student by drawing a daily comic strip for the college newspaper. It was called I, Argus Aardvark and was about an aardvark who shows up at college with intellectual and some ridiculous literary aspirations (I was making fun of the idea of wanting to be a writer long before I wanted to be a writer). My wanderings inside the library inspired this Argus, circa November 1995 (see above). -- source link

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