The world is my book

Hello! I’m rather enjoying Knitsonik’s back to school challenge, and thought I’d join in with a few posts about capturing that distinctive September feeling. Here’s my response to Felix’s third prompt – schools – and in the spirit of thinking about spaces and locales of learning, I wanted to share with you a postcard which I have carried around with me since the early 2000s and which I have taken down and replaced somewhere near every desk I’ve ever worked at. Here is the postcard, by my desk right now, in my wee library at the mill.

The postcard shows a young woman standing, in cloche hat and coat, with an armful of books, outside the Los Angeles Central Library, one of LA’s architectural landmarks, designed in 1925 by Bertram Goodhue. This aspirational building has many extraordinary decorative elements of which this doorway is just one. Designed by famous inter-war sculptor, Lee Lawrie, the huge marble lintel is supported by two “Egyptian” caryatids, and topped with an arc decorated with an exuberant parade of creatures. Beneath the arc reads an incised motto “the world is my book”.

The photograph really captures its own moment, I think: Lee Lawrie’s bold Art Deco sculpture and the girl in her stylish outfit both conveying something of the distinctive Californian confidence of that era. That’s one reason why I like this postcard, I suppose, and it also reminds me of a very specific period and space of learning in my own life. During the early 2000s, I was the recipient of several US library fellowships, and lived in Los Angeles for a time. I rented a room from a disillusioned couple who disliked their film industry hustles and had bought, and were attempting to renovate, one of those huge, ramshackle Arts and Crafts houses on West Adams. Between my room and the libraries I walked everywhere or got buses, much to the disapproval of my landlady, who seemed weirdly terrified of the diversity of the very streets that she had chosen as her home, but whose vitality and generosity, was, in fact, the one thing that I really enjoyed about Los Angeles (apart from the 18th century manuscripts at the Huntington and the Clark). In some ways, then, the figure at the door is me, a young researcher, enjoying her time in a new city, excited to enter a new archive.

But it is the motto above the door that really resonates with me, and which is the reason that I have carried this piece of ephemera about with me for more than 20 years, and still like to look at it. To me, “the world is my book”, says so much about knowledge and learning and the spaces in which those things occur. Carved above a public library, the phrase certainly suggests the ability of books to transport you to any place you’d like to go, and conveys the idea of a space of study as itself a magical portal to other imaginative spaces. But the motto also tells you that what is outside the library walls, and perhaps where you are right now, is a learning space of equivalent importance. So what I like most about the image, and indeed the doorway itself, is the very specific way it links the interior of the library to its exterior, reminding you that learning is something that can happen quite literally anywhere, if you maintain the open mind, and sense of curiosity, that enables you to regard the whole world as your book. There is something so optimistic and expansive in this view of learning, which is a good thing to remind oneself of, especially when you are someone who spends a lot of time reading and working indoors. Because although knowledge can certainly emerge from a manuscript or a printed page, you might learn or discover just as much from your daily encounters with the world: from a conversation on a street corner in Watts, from a bus ride to San Marino, or from a daily walk on a beach in Kintyre. This postcard depicting a Los Angeles library doorway reminds me to always remain curious, to keep an open mind, and to welcome learning, in all its forms, and in whatever worldly spaces it occurs.

#KNITSONIKbacktoschool