Special Collections x MD: Bringing the past to light

Beneath Maastricht University’s (UM) Inner City Library, where sunlight and bird songs are shut out by thick walls and doors, lies a world of the past. This world has its own soundscape, composed of the buzzing sounds of temperature control units and air conditioning. Silver tubes run like veins over the ceiling, red metal shelves form narrow corridors of light. LED bathes the room in its yellowish glow but does not touch the fragile pages of the hundreds of thousands of books stocked between the shelves. Books, most centuries-old, exuding the smell of tobacco and dust, holding between their pages past stories and ideas, once based on the world their authors inhabited, now archived, sometimes interrogated, and judged based on a new world - the “outside” world, they rarely see themselves.

On the Maastricht Diplomat’s (MD’s) visit to UM’s Special Collections, the mix of wonder and sensory stimulation stirred up a bunch of stories and associations for Carolina and A.G, all explored hereafter.

In a different time and a different place, another set of books sat behind closed doors – this time in the storage space of a charity shop A.G worked at. There were comic books and textbooks and classics and much more weighing down shelves, filling cardboard boxes, and even covering the floor, tall stacks tucked in corners. New books could only be brought to the front gradually, as they moved quite slowly through the store, with the exception of pulp romance. But even with a temporary hold on accepting literary donations, low prices, and a dedicated volunteer who tamed the book corner in the front of the store, the storage room was slowly being buried.

Sometimes, calls would come in - hopeful voices asking whether the shop had the last volume of a series. Then, a staff member would usually squint at the book corner before admitting they were out of their depth. Other times, some bookish person would inspect that corner for a while, quietly prying out a selection that they’d lovingly store in a tote bag or backpack on checkout. In those instances, when people seemed to really search, whether for a classic to perfect their treasured collection or for another sci-fi novel to pore over on a pillowed windowsill, A.G found it difficult not to offer them to explore that buried storage room. But throwing people into a pile of books likely would not have been enough without tools for them to find what they wanted.

In contrast, the Special Collections prioritize accessibility, making it easier for a wider audience to access information. One of the tools for making literary sources more accessible is digitizing the collections. Seeing a yellowed tome sitting in a sleek metal scanner, with its pages carefully pressed down by a thick glass sheet, its pages being scanned one by one, can quickly put into perspective the work required to let us read one specific chapter of one specific book, possibly from an armchair halfway across the country.

If you can visit, digitization should not diminish any motivation to inspect the Special Collections in person. Just like some people go on treasure hunts in charity shops, or perhaps coincidentally stumble over an eye-catching publication, rehoming books discarded by others, the archive is a treasure trove for many different suitors. Researchers, teachers, students, and other seekers who find their way to UM’s Special Collections tend to express a certain delight, carefully caressing the pages and covers of books in recognition of their value and fragility. An experienced collector will know not to wear gloves because it has been found that tactile connection makes for safer handling.

Even though they can be accessed in these different ways, locking up books does something strange to how we perceive them. It evokes an air of mystery and gives books, as carriers of (written) knowledge, a special status.

It seems this perception starts forming early. Whether you’re a first grader in the 21st century erasing a spelling mistake from your notebook, or an ancient Greek student scratching your wax tablet clean, you might find that there is something different about your mode of writing and the book or papyrus scroll you’re working from. And for some, this is also when the desire to access special knowledge in books kicks in.

During her teenage years, Carolina was obsessed with reading. It all started with annual reading competitions, a program recording how many books she read and how much of their content she remembered. Young Carolina’s proudest moment came about when she logged her 100th book. Every year, there was a reputation to defend and a significant prize to win.

The village library opened on Wednesday evening for a few hours, a tight timeframe to scout the shelves for treasures. The librarian, acquainted with the little girl's indecisiveness, knew to occasionally make an exception and let her borrow an extra book. Soon, the small room above the town hall became a tad too small. Luckily, there was the high school library.

Carolina dreamt of building her own collection and even convinced her parents to furnish a whole wall in her room with bookshelves. When it came to filling those shelves, Carolina started to develop a list of must-reads, sometimes listing books mentioned within books. And that is how one Christmas, she came to own Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. The original version dates back to 1550 and is most definitely a collector’s piece. It is a book deemed worth preserving, whose mention connotes knowledge about art history, but most importantly, knowledge about what knowledge about art history is held in high esteem. Carolina never owned any old or authentic enough edition of the book for it to be an artifact as valuable as any of the books in the Special Collections. But at a young age, she already got a sense of the appeal of particular publications and the desirability of a specific kind of knowledge.

“When society collapsed, the librarians didn’t.”

So opened the video by Luke Humphris, telling a hopeful post-apocalyptic story that centers librarians as key organizers, educators, and resource providers. They know how to find information, how to present it in a useful way, and how to help people turn theory into practice.

But this work takes a village, and the archives’ proper preservation requires heavy lifting from its caretakers. The headline collection at the Special Collections is the Jesuit collection, which has over 250.000 volumes and contains a broad range of materials, from early modern prints of anatomical atlases to a surprising number of travel books. Outside of the Jesuit library, the Special Collections also holds the private libraries of Maastricht physicist and Nobel prize winner Peter Debye and Maastricht poet Pierre Kemp, and correspondence and pictures of Limburg painter Charles Eyck.

On the MD’s visit, historian Melissa Prinz told them that even the staff there did not know everything that they had - there was just so much of it. This was surprising. Everything was so neat, the red push shelves pristine, each book in sight marked.

But it was also exciting, heightening a sense that was already there. The Special Collections preserves knowledge in the form of antique books, letters, articles, and manuscripts, the oldest one dating back to 1471. There is something about the space that inspires creativity, perhaps the thought about being amidst old souls’ and great thinkers’ legacy. There is a strange attraction to “discovering” the past, and the esteem in handling designated treasures.

The archive’s infrastructure and categorizing practices contribute to the feeling that we are gaining a sneak peek into a special world. We imagine knowledge and history as embedded within the pages of books and consider ourselves responsible for their preservation for future generations. Of course, the archive’s imperative is preservation, and as such, bearing witness to human history and culture. And in this statement lies the force that drives our appreciation for the Special Collections teams’ work - the reliance on visual, documented, tangible facts of human civilization.

In envisioning the past, however, we often forget to consider its less romantic aspects. We forget to insert a narrator different from us, with different values, ideas, and experiences, and who is, like their books, a product of their time. We forget that books are more than just vessels for knowledge. They are cultural artifacts conveying the context and craftsmanship of their time, telling a story of their own. Moreover, they represent a knowledge distribution system within our society, and they can be institutional tools to reinforce values and reproduce dominant discourses. However, books also have the potential to be sites of resistance, as book burnings and bans throughout history show. Accordingly, a key tenet of the Special Collections team’s work is that the archive should always be a place of active learning, of questioning our own biases, of being challenged and thinking critically about the traces of another time left by real people, now at our fingertips.