Book selected: Squirrels’ Tails and Burnished Gold, Paintings in the Indian Miniature Tradition, Gallery Mansur
It would be wrong to alter this book and I have left it untouched. I have made some notes sparked off by the title, and return the book together with the notes as my contribution.
I am neither an educator nor a librarian so I cannot speak to what books should be acquired for a library collection. However it may be easier to draw up a set of criteria on which the decision as to when to junk a book should be taken. As I understand it, and forgive me if I have got a hold of the wrong end of the stick, the library junks books when, after a period, no one has taken them out. They are then offered to the students at a bargain price – this one went begging at 5 pence – and then, if there are no takers, they are sent to the pulpers.
That seems to me a totally inadequate policy so here is how I would go about it.
First I would look at whether the book was available elsewhere, and – if so – how easy it was to get access to it. On that score, I could not find copies of the book (which was published in India) in any library catalogue that I searched. I confined my search to Britain.
Then I would look at how easy or how difficult it was to store the book, and what the likely costs of retaining it were, bearing in mind that the initial acquisition costs and the cost of cataloguing it had already been borne. On that score, the book is more properly described as a pamphlet. I didn’t note the dimensions, but it is smaller than A4 in size and has 12 pages. So it takes up very little physical space and could be stored – let us say – in a box with other pamphlets in the library collection. I imagine its storage costs as an individual item are nugatory.
Talking about value is more difficult. I propose to leave the general principle at this – it was once valued enough for someone to acquire it for the library and for the librarian to give it shelf space. That is not valued at this exact time, seems to me to be not necessarily here and not necessarily there in terms of considering whether it properly should remain part of a library collection.
Having said that, the physical volume itself is beautiful, the illustrations are beautiful, the text is fluent and raises (for me at least) a plethora of interesting questions.
To write about the text and the book itself would be another undertaking so I will leave it for now with this hope – that the book finds its way into the hands of an artist who will cherish it, who will not wish to turn it into yet another work of art, and who will (dare I hope this?) see that one way or another it finds itself ultimately in a place of safety. That it is killed, to paraphrase De Quincy, so that a subsequent generation may call it back into life; buried so that posterity may command it to rise again.
Who do you think a library is for?
Sarah Jacobs
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