Connections/Books

My name is Ken Soehner. I'm chief librarian at the Metropolitan Museum, and my topic is "Books." Last

winter, I was working one Saturday in what we call the book cage, where we lock up some of the rare books. I'm working away, and

my daughter, who's eleven, she's sitting on a book truck paging through a book herself, and she leans back, takes in a deep breath and says, "I love that smell!" At that moment she was partaking in a tradition.

Each library has its own distinctive smell. There's a lot of organic matter there, after all. There's leather, and there's cotton paper

wood pulp paper, and stacks develop their own distinctive scent.

For me, the Metropolitan Museum is very much a house of books. Sometimes works of art take the shape of a book, as a

beautiful ivory booklet that carries within it a number of stories.

A Greek physician on a sarcophagus, he's long gone, but his image

of being absorbed in his scrolls is still with us. This is from about 300 A.D. The scrolls are there because the codex, the book as we know it, hadn't been developed yet.

There are some books that you'd be very foolish not to judge by the cover. Holy books, whether it's a prayer book or a

Qur'an, are decorated, housed in exquisite bindings

or written in a manner that exemplifies artistry.

Books have a symbolic importance that goes far beyond the text. In Annunciation scenes Mary is interrupted by the Angel Gabriel in her reading.

And the fact that she's reading is an expression of her virtue, and also alludes to the story that most of the viewers would know.

We also see the Christ child paging through a book with excited enthusiasm. It's not a book handling procedure that I recommend.

In fact it exemplifies all the ways that one shouldn't hold a book. Just last week in the library I had to

with only a stare, but it seemed sufficient, admonish someone who was tearing through a book.

Books are also vocational markers in portraits. They can be symbolic of one's worldliness, that one has traveled the world

that one has achieved the status of scholar.

In the Bronzino, you see the figure holding a book where it seems as if there's mastery over just about everything. But there's not much worse, other than dropping it in the tub, you can do to a book than

sticking your finger in the middle of it and squeezing it with the rest of your hand.

I think van Gogh is one of the great painters of books. They are very bookish.

They're very much about the materiality of books. They are not props. They're part of the inevitability of everyday life. Oddly

enough, they're very often not the sitter's books, but van Gogh's books.

It's the self-portrait, in a way, through his books.

If I were to choose one of my favorite still lifes, it would be in Saint Catherine's book stand

where you see half a dozen books or so, brightly and beautifully colored, in this wonderfully convenient, revolving book stand. To me it's a bouquet of books.

The single librarian I can identify is Winckelmann, who is reading his sacred book, The Iliad by Homer. He had worked as a librarian as a part of his life, so he's an especially important figure to me.

I think it's going to be many years before there's a formal portrait where the sitter

is clutching his or her Kindle or iPad. I'm not at all concerned that the

interest in the book is going to disappear. Of course, we're increasingly electronic, but the printed book is

still essential to us.