Essex boys and beautiful books – talk at the V&A Reading Rooms

Update 7th March 2011: A very nice review of the same evening from the Sense Worldwide blog here. Thanks for the link, guys!

I was incredibly lucky last night to be invited, by my good friend Bill Freeman, to a talk at the new V&A Reading Rooms. The talk, given by Essex boy Dr. Jonathan Faiers who, besides being a lecturer and author, is the Book Buyer for the V&A, and has been doing it for 25 years.

His talk was really quite fascinating. He started by asking what kind of space will books occupy in our society, and showed this charming animation for a new children’s book based around someone who just doesn’t ‘get’ books:

He then went on to show us some of his books from his youth which he was fascinated by, which were peppered with the things that people love books for: good smells, hand drawn illustrations, attractive spines, embossing details etc. His talk was, largely, a personal journey with books and how their relationship has changed.

Bill and I were talking after the event and were delighted he didn’t go down the well trodden and, frankly, boring route of ‘is the Kindle going to destroy books’. Largely, I think his point was that eventuality will never happen. There’s something about books that will always mean there will be bookshelves to be sold and filled.

When Jonathan was talking about the beauty of picture books, how we look at them, the way they feel and the gloss of the picture, it made me think of the books that I cherish, purely through the medium of books.

Taryn Simon’s excellent book An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar was the first one to come to mind – the excellent reproductions of Simon’s intriguing shots of the unknown in America, coupled with the concise descriptions and contexts of each work, is something that is a tried and tested on the internet (even on her own website), but there is something about it being in a book. Its a cohesive idea, instead of more internet flotsam people pick upon like little USB Memory stick magpies.

That’s why I love the Reading Rooms (pictured above). Books are something to linger over, to consider and study and to put down and come back to. There is something comforting about the fact that, whilst Firefox screams at you to update Adobe, you can always turn to Moby Dick and know those famous first lines. Its the fixity of books that are their real merits.

The Rooms are the culmination of Jonathan (and other staff, with excellent taste!) interests, a cornucopia of ideas, influences and, importantly, beautiful books. Literature, art, photography and fashion are splayed out in exquisitely designed books. The V&A have created a space that, much like its museum counterpart, deserves revisiting.

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