Packing my Library
Walter Benjamin and Me
“I have made the most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his 1931 essay, “Unpacking My Library.”
In this essay, Benjamin imagines the book collector as a spy on a literary reconnaissance mission. “Collectors are gifted with tactical instincts,” he writes, “their experience teaches them that when they capture a foreign city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a strategic position.”¹ Benjamin’s book collection condenses his nomadic life, traversing Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, and Paris.
“How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” the collector exclaims nostalgically, imagining how the books salvaged from antiquarian shops could patch together a life ravaged by wars.
Gathered together on the shelves of a single collector, Benjamin believed that books stood for more than their contents: inscribed with their collector’s mortality, a personal library is marked by every way station through which the reader’s life has passed.
Benjamin’s Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, and Paris are my Bristol, Tbilisi, Dushanbe, Delhi, Hyderabad, Isfahan, Damascus, Yerevan, and Grozny. In each of these cities, so…
