Reading in Tongues

During the summer, we asked Interns Emma, Gabrielle, Brendan and Jessica to create a virtual collection by collecting digital images of some aspect of the library collection to be decided by them. For example, they could collect images of bookplates in the collection, of details on binding, books with funny titles, or books on a particular subject – the possibilities were endless. On July 31, at the Library Open House, each collection was presented. In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting each intern’s collection along with a few other posts they created during their time in the Library.

This week’s collection comes from Brendan Higgins who is a student at the College of William and Mary. Brendan described his collection “Reading in Tongues” as follows:

“During my first few weeks at the Jean Outland Chrysler Library, I came across a number of books in what I thought—with my narrow, naïve worldview—were exotic, obscure languages. Often I couldn’t even make an educated guess as to what I was looking at, let alone comprehend it. Something Scandinavian? Something Germanic? Something with a strange alphabet? That was about the best I could do. Despite my ignorance, however, I’m fascinated by linguistics, particularly by our planet’s rich variety of distinct though often interconnected languages. So when I began to consider my personal collection project, I thought I’d indulge my interest by seeing exactly how many and what languages I could find represented in the stacks. I started by listing as many as I could think of and entering each one as a general search in the online catalog. With trial and error, I refined my technique until I had a fairly efficient method of searching, jotting down several promising books (or only one, in some cases), and then finding the most photogenic and interesting of these on the shelf. Although it was still an imperfect method, it guided me in the right direction, and often I’d stumble upon a more suitable book along the way. In the end, I was blown away to have gathered a pile of 31 books in as many languages, certain also that I had left some uncovered—a testament to the depth and cosmopolitanism of the collections here. My selections spanned close to a century, with most areas of the world represented by at least one language, from Korean to Zulu to Catalan to Estonian. Some I chose for being topically significant to their places of origin—discussing something either deeply associated or unexpected and refreshing—while others I simply chose because they amused me (e.g. Radicalchip, a book in Welsh and English on contemporary Japanese art). In doing this project, I began to recognize more fully that each language is inseparable from the people and culture that claims it; as such, each foreign language book in the Chrysler’s collection has value beyond that of its content.”

A collage featuring the images Brendan gathered appears above. All of the images in Brendan’s collection can be found here.