Exactly what sort of installation he hasn’t figured out yet. (He has the cards, but Harvard, with its finely tuned sense of relative worth, kept the cabinets.) Mr. Johnston’s previous work has often played with bibliographic themes: he made, for example, a series of large, geometric paintings that were hung in pairs. “If you look at them a certain way, you might see a book,” he told me. More recently, he solicited pieces of hair — strands, braids, and dreadlocks — from strangers and acquaintances and taped them onto selected pages of a Gallimard edition of Camus’s L’Etranger. (The book still closes, but not completely.) When one of the “C” boxes arrived from Harvard, just before Johnston left for France, he looked up the cards for Camus. “There’s no rod holding them in. You just pull it out, read it, turn it over, sometimes there’s notes on the back.…” He doesn’t think, however, that he will be taping hair to the Camus cards, because of his personal vow to do no harm. He is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara. (UCSB, incidentally, finished throwing out its main catalog in the summer of (1993.) The Harvard cards come packed in old memos from OCLC’s RETROCON folks announcing softball games, potluck dinners, and paper-airplane contests, and Johnston is saving these crumpled communiqués, too, true antiquarian that he is.
He is weighing the possibility of inviting international artists and “thinkers” to send him their ideas about what should happen to his sizable collection. Though he is pleased to have it—“Think of all the people who have touched those cards!”—he is concerned about how much of his studio it will eventually occupy, about the hundreds of boxes getting out of order, about whether he’ll go crazy having taken on this responsibility, and about the substantial cost of postage, which he, rather than Harvard, is voluntarily bearing. “I think I owe them money,” he said. He wonders what the reaction will be when the world learns what he now legally owns. Maybe Harvard will suddenly decide that it misses this large, conveniently packaged core sample of its history and will ask for it back. “That would be fine, too,” Mr. Johnston said.
Maybe, in fact, the riskiest, most thought-provoking piece of conceptual art that anyone could create out of these found materials is the original card catalog, enclosed in its own cabinets, sitting undisturbed somewhere within the library it once described.
(1994)
Books as Furniture
On the cover of a recent mail-order catalog from a place called The Company Store, a man and a woman in white pajamas are posed in the middle of a pillow fight. But there isn’t one feather in the air, because The Company Store, of La Crosse, Wisconsin, sells new pillows — not stale, corrupt, depopulated pillows from some earlier era of human insomnia, but fresh, unashamedly swollen dream-bags corpulent with clean, large-cluster white goose down of a quality that only European white polar geese can grow. The Company Store also sells things like new flannel blankets, new bed wedges, and new baffled-box comforters. They are not in the business of selling beat-up editions of forgotten nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century books.
But in another way The Company Store is in fact a used-bookseller — or at least the people there are committed book propagandists — since more than twenty old volumes appear in the pages of the catalog. On top of a pile of five folio-folded Wamsutta sheets in Bluette, Black Cherry, Ivory, Sunset, and Onyx, there sits a worn oblong shape that looks to date from about 1880, with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses resting on it — glasses that might be used to read the pages they surmount. Sadly, it isn’t quite possible to make out the title on the book’s spine. But the title in another picture in this catalog — a very small photograph on page 66—does, just barely, cross the threshold of decipherability. The catalog designer has reversed the negative, so that the letters are backward, and the words they spell are partly covered by a finger, but if you look closely you can still identify which book, out of all the books that have ever been published, is lying open facedown on a white-pajamaed thigh — the thigh, it seems, of the woman who was first seen pillow-fighting on the cover. Now she is alone, lost in a fiction-inspired reverie, leaning against a vertical pillow prop with low, stumpy arms that is helping her sit up in bed: one of those readers’ pillows that my wife and her college friends used to call “husbands.” The woman is in the middle of reading The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, published in 1904 and written by someone named Mary E. Waller.
I went to a big library and took the elevator to the lowest level of the underground stacks, and found there a copy of The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus identical with the one in the picture. The novel is about an unsophisticated high-altitude apple farmer named Hughie, who lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, on Mt. Olympus — or Mt. ’Lympus, as the locals call it. A falling log has left Hughie crippled in some serious and vaguely Hemingwayesque way, so Hughie, with marriage now out of the question, teaches himself wood carving, aided from afar by cultured friends. They forward him trunkfuls of books and reproductions of European art: he reads Carlyle and George Sand and Browning and Bret Harte, and he stares attentively at a photograph of Michelangelo’s David; and, little by little, under this mail-order tutelage and influence, Hughie succeeds in elevating himself from limping amateur whittler to Olympian panel artist and wainscoteur. One of his correspondents, Madeline, on her way through northern Italy, sends him a set of carved black-oak bookshelves. She writes him, “I like to imagine all those books you have been gathering and making yours on these special shelves.”
I’ve been thinking about bookshelves myself lately, and imagining the shelves one might fill by searching through mail-order catalogs for the books they use as props (often searching at extremely close range: part of the delight comes in figuring out, with the aid of tiny clues and keyword computer searches, the identity of a book whose title at first seems totally illegible), and I’ve been thinking, too, about what our mail-order catalogs and our bookshelves, those two affiliated regions of cultural self-display, reveal about the sort of readers we are, or wish we were. We are not, clearly, whatever The Company Store would have us believe, casual bedtime consumers of the novels and travel books of Mary E. Waller. The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus went through at least twenty-three printings after 1904, according to the copyright page — which would have made it a big book for Little, Brown — but my copy was last checked out on January 19, 1948, and was returned on January 20: too promptly, one suspects, to have been read. The model in the white pajamas and I could be the only two people who have read, or pretended to read, this work in several decades. And yet a very small image of it has been delivered by bulk-rate mail to thousands of households. In another picture in the catalog, the pajama woman is asleep, embracing a seventy-two-inch-long body pillow: she is dreaming, needless to say, of disabled mountain men and the bookshelves full of Carlyle that taught them everything they know; The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus waits on her bedside table.