Authors librarians: Borges, Duchamp, Vlado Martek, Goethe and others.

Many famous philosophers, writers and scientists worked as librarians at some point in their lives (Eratosthenes, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, Béla Hamvas and many others), and some of them made a significant contribution to the library profession (such as the philosopher, mathematician, philologist and historian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz). There were a lot of interesting authors, and here we will present seven of them from the literary and artistic fields.

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798)

Casanova was a writer, translator, musician, diplomat, traveler, and dreamer. His character and adventurous life have been presented in several novels and films (see "Fellini's Casanova"). He wrote memoirs that are considered an authentic and valuable depiction of 18th-century society and are an important historical source. He began his work towards the end of his life, as a librarian to Count Waldstein in Bohemia, which was "the only remedy for preventing madness or dying of grief." It would be said that the aged Casanova was quite bored after his wanderings in a small town and in an isolated library, but this at least prompted him to write.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

During his lifetime in Weimar, Gothe held many important positions, and was active in the Council of State and the diplomatic service, he was the manager of the slate mine, the director of the theater and various other cultural institutions, and among other things, he became the director of the Ducal Library. He approached this work with the same zeal and as thoroughly as everyone else. He procured new shelves, set the working hours of librarians, supervised cataloguing, ordered the uprooting of the entire hedge that drew moisture into the library premises, arranged new rules for the lending and return of books, initiated the sale of duplicates and unnecessary materials through auctions, and supervised who used the keys to the library. An important task for him was to merge the Ducal Library and the library of the University of Jena. (See: Goethe as Librarian, Author(s): Christa Sammons, Source: The Yale University Library Gazette, July 1978, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 26-28, URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40858660) Goethe was a humanist of broad knowledge and was systematically educated throughout his life in various fields, so it is not surprising that he was also a dedicated librarian.

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)

Lewis Carroll is best remembered for his "Alice in Wonderland", and it is also known that under the real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson he was a professor of mathematics at Oxford. His interest in words and mathematical logic also merged in his puzzle games, which he published in 1879 under the title "Doublets" in "Vanity Fair" magazine, and then as a book. He originally called the game "language scales", and it consists of translating a given starting word into a given end word by changing one letter at each step, but in such a way that each new word makes sense. Many other aspects of his life have been explored, such as his interest in photography, but it is less well known that in addition to his professorship, he also held a librarian position at Christ Church College, and very conscientiously took care of the reading of his students. We believe that Caroll's work with books encouraged him to constantly be a "curiouser and curiouser".

Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922)

Proust is one of the most respected authors of the 20th century, setting the framework of postmodernism with his work: the theme of literary reality, that is, reality in language that stands in an ambivalent relationship to reality, and the theme of chronological time versus the personal experience of the passage of time and reconstructive literary memory that builds its own time. Proust was well-off and lived in salons and literary circles, but at the request of his father, who thought that his son needed some stability in life, he applied for a volunteer position at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. He never actually worked there, but very soon received a leave of absence due to illness, which lasted for several years. Obviously, if he had to do anything, he would work in the library, but he would rather not do anything binding. The most important thing, however, is that he was a brilliant writer.

Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)

During 1912. Duchamp wanted to retire from artistic activities to a job in which he could earn a modest living and contemplate his next work. He completed a library course and got a job for a short time as an intern at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. He really liked this "intellectual work", especially because he "had a lot of time for himself". Every activity and life experience was included in Duchamp's work (see Elena Filipović's book "The Aparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp", MIT Press), including this work in the library (e.g. archiving, collage, use of text).

 

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986)

Borges worked for some time in a small city library, mainly cataloguing materials, and in 1955 he was appointed director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, where he remained until 1973, when he stepped down due to Perón's coming to power. As he was already blind at that time, the position was mostly considered honorary, and his office actually became a working cabinet for writing and translating. Borges stated in an interview that he always followed the events in the library and worked on its well-being, but the affairs were mostly led by his deputy. In addition to his questionable contribution to the library profession, Borges created a paradigmatic image of the library on which many new interpretations continued. In the story "The Library of Babel", a library-labyrinth is presented, in which all books ever written and unwritten are stored, because the collection includes books with all possible combinations of letters. Among them is the comprehensive book that all librarians are looking for as they wander through the endless corridors. Borges varies his themes of myth, labyrinth, authorship, truth and fictionalization, and his library encompasses the whole world, because it encompasses all knowledge and ignorance, meaning and nonsense that can or cannot be expressed.

 

Vlado Martek (b. 1951.)

Vlado Martek, one of the members of the Group of Six Authors, appeared in art in the 1970s with works that sought a new form of communication with the audience. His inscriptions/messages pasted on the walls (Read Malevich, Read Kamov) became legendary, and he continued his further work with exhibitions and actions on the street, objects, installations, assemblages, drawings, poems (which he calls preludes) and other forms of new artistic practice. The connection between the textual and the visual has always been important in his work, which he probably owes to his studies of philosophy and literature, and perhaps to the fact that he spent his entire working life in the library. In one interview, he stated: "I was lucky in life, because working in the library first freed me from the pressure of commerciality, and secondly, it allowed me to read a lot, to be close to knowledge, to follow and conclude (Jutarnji list, 5/6/2024)." Our conclusion is: Read Martek.