Volumes, Maite Iracheta

Compiling an issue on libraries requires volumes of humility. I will resist the urge to list the number of libraries I have visited (my memory touches the mosaics of the al-Qarawiyyin Library) or imagined (my stroll as of this morning through the library on Ali Smith’s Gliff) or to explain that upon crossing their thresholds (which is the same, really, always) is to participate in inquiry as if in a perpetual chorus. The library is a siren whose call, solid in the landscape of knowledge, we are destined to answer by reading.

The notions of what a library is (think old Alexandria) are multiplying: no longer limited to being a physical space, they persist in opening public spaces. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Don Quixote carried both home and library on their backs. The 21st-century human carries a potential library with their technological devices. Two Danish brothers began the Human Library Project, where a human is like a book that can be borrowed to answer questions about their life, to be read closely, eye to eye. The Uncensored Library, a branch of Reporters Without Borders created through Minecraft, exists or rather inexists (on the Internet), as an online library where no world reporter is censored. And there’s the Little Free Libraries project, an initiative by Rick Brooks in 2009 inspired by the more than 2,500 libraries that Andrew Carnegie founded a century and a half earlier in the United States, seeking to equal them in number while multiplying their impact: the portable size of a tiny library that can be set up outside homes inviting neighbors to take a book or donate one. By 2026, there are 200,000 Little Free Libraries spread across 128 countries in the world.

For those who pray and pilgrimage in libraries, it is fitting to see that the design of their spaces remains a dream for architects (a stopover for some angels). Monumental works in themselves, libraries are temples and literate public squares. Perhaps the improbable idea of ​​Borges’s Library of Babel will one day be attainable—perhaps when that day, that system, has a different name—for the future remains tireless; those who have given up will insist on comparing it to the internet.

addanomadd’s issue #15 presents a diverse collection of dimensions and voices whose combination could exist in a humble collection, say, in a Little Free Library, flanked by its own Patience and Fortitude. Come in, reader, for we readers understand the place where readers are royalty and commoners and thus the beauty of the ritual.