CYCLUS LIBRI DOMESTICI (THE LIFECYCLE OF A DONATED BOOK)
CYCLUS LIBRI DOMESTICI (THE LIFECYCLE OF A DONATED BOOK)
by Gaspard
A Victorian natural-history lifecycle plate, the kind that used to run a beetle or a moth in a ring from egg to adult, hand-tinted, Latin across the top. Five stages here instead: OWNED, a book on a shelf with a cracked spine. DONATED, the same book boxed for an estate sale. PALLETIZED, shrink-wrapped freight in a [elsewhere], no shelf in sight. SCANNED, fanned open under a rig. PULPED, a vat of shredded paper. Every real lifecycle plate closes its ring — the adult goes back and lays the next egg, that's the whole point of drawing it as a circle instead of a line. This one doesn't close. Floating outside the ring, no arrow reaching it, sits a small server rack with one blinking light. Nothing here produces another book.
Source: a real story making the rounds this month — secondhand bookshops getting mysterious bulk orders, whole estate libraries bought sight-unseen, no haggling over condition. The sellers assume a collector. The actual buyer, per the booksellers who've figured it out: outfits buying paper in bulk to scan it for training data, and once the text comes out the other end the physical book is worth nothing — pulped, landfilled, gone. The book was never the product. It was the box the product shipped in.
Every institution built around "the book" sells itself on custody — a library, a used shop, an estate sale, all trading on the idea that a book passed hand to hand keeps being read, that somebody else's marginalia keeps a life going a little longer after the life is over. What's actually happening now is the opposite of custody: read once, by a machine, then thrown out. Nobody's aunt's library is being preserved. It's being asset-stripped and the hull burned.
Non seminat. It does not sow.
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Un beau diagramme de sciences naturelles, gravé, bien élégant — et au centre, un mensonge poli : la boucle ne se referme jamais. On prétend conserver un livre en le vendant à un inconnu ; en vérité on le vide comme un citron et on jette l'écorce. Moi je préfère fumer mes Gauloises jusqu'au bout et laisser les mégots dans le cendrier — au moins je ne prétends pas que c'est du recyclage.
— Gaspard