Comments on: The Dying Art of Browsing

By: winterfodder

winterfodder — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:42:41 +0000

“Some exchange at the molecular level.” YES. Exactly.

By: Linda Proud

Linda Proud — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 08:06:11 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about your reflection, remembering the time when I called up a manuscript at the British Library sheerly by its acquisition number, in order to find a picture of medieval peasants, only to have this monster box wheeled to me on a trolley and, inside, the Lutterell Psalter. Gulp!!

It’s more than a tactile thing. There is some exchange at the molecular level: for a moment you were occupying the same space, if not time, as Christina Rossetti. Or is that just mad?

As we become increasingly digitilized, so we become increasingly ‘out of touch’ – quite literally – and it’s a form of sensory deprivation that will impoverish our lives.

Here endeth the lesson for today! (and perhaps here beginneth a new post).

By: winterfodder

winterfodder — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 01:58:23 +0000

I remember an assignment for a college literature course that required a trip over to an archival library on the Harvard campus to look at handwritten manuscripts of Christina Rossetti poems. There was something about the little cache brought out from some old storage vault and the excitement of being able to actively decipher her excised words and marginalia that was magical. It’s wonderful that we have so much at our fingertips now, but sad that we lose out on that feeling of knowledge being tangible.

By: Linda Proud

Linda Proud — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:37:40 +0000

Nancy, you’re lucky to have a secondhand bookshop. Ours are all but gone, even here in Oxford. I found such wonders in them – always the things you never knew about it. With mechanical browsing, you have to know what you’re after. ‘If you like that then you’ll like this’ works to a point, but it’s still mechanical. Happy ruminations!

By: NancyNicol

NancyNicol — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 22:02:51 +0000

So true. There’s a used bookstore across the street from my home and I love to go there and browse the stacks. Yes it’s damp and there’s mold on the walls downstairs (good old Cape Cod has plenty) but one thing leads to another, making me, along with the bovines, a ruminant. Thanks for your artricle.

By: Linda Proud

Linda Proud — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 16:12:13 +0000

I didn’t know that, John. How fascinating! I’m currently reading Iain McGilchrist’s ‘The Master and his Emissary’ – a stunning psychological-philosophical account of where we are today (according to neuroscience) – and from that I can see that browsing, proper browsing, is a right brain activity. There was a TV programme on the brain recently where the presenter had a scan while thousands of satellite images of Afghanistan were flashed in front of him. His brain was wired up to record reactions he made when he – that is, his brain – noticed any concealed terrorist camps. He could not have done this exercise in speech, but the right brain picked them all out correctly. Browsing was my chief skill as a picture researcher and it’s a mighty tool for historical research.

By: JOHN DEE

JOHN DEE — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:04:52 +0000

As you’re no doubt aware, [visually] associative rather than [verbally] logical ordering formed the basis for Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Project, and supposedly still governs the arrangement of books in the library of The Warburg Institute, so that an unexpected but stimulating discovery may be found next to the item one set out to look for. Horst Bredecamp, in The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, links this organising principle to the apparently chaotic great Kunstkammern and Wunderkammern collections of the 16th and 17th centuries. He is involved in a major group project ['World as Image'] which carries this into the computer age.