Candida Höfer's Libraries, essay by Umberto Eco is a big book of beauty for a bibliophile. The essay by Umberto Eco places you squarely, or in Eco's case—diagonally, as in sideways rain—in the middle of a good read seated upon a cushion of thick mohair velvet in one of his two favorite libraries: the Sterling Library at Yale and the new library of the University of Toronto. So, go ahead, be my guest, pull up a companion chair and slide right into the silence of the imagination... dream about oversized stationary imprinted with the immaculate scrolls of an elegant cursive hand, perhaps the beginnings of a novel? Is it yours, or have you slipped between the pages of Umberto's next manuscripts—we know he's still writing.
"In other words, if the library is, as Borges put it, a model of the universe, we must try to transform it into a universe on a human scale, and, I would remind you, a human scale also means a light-hearted scale, with the chance of a coffee, even with the chance for two students to sit down on a couch of an afternoon and, if not to indulge in indecent behavior, at least enjoy the continuation of their flirtation in the library as they take down or replace some books of scientific interest from their shelves."—Umberto Eco
From Amsterdam to Rio de Janeiro, and all points in between, my favorite of Höfer's tour is Biblioteca Angelica Roma II. A three tiered architectural wedding cake of promise, hope, and longing, on the second and third level, the entrance door is hidden by the clever run of faux "books on shelves" adorned with the actual dust skirts that run the lengths of the room, lest the spines be weighted by time.
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