Ordainers of the Universe

Before I even set foot inside the Wellcome Collection’s Reading Room it’s obvious that this is not going to be a “normal” book space. There are two notices outside the entrance – one says ‘No food or drink’, and the other? Well, am I supposed to take it as a warning or as an incitement to curiosity?

‘This gallery contains human remains,’ it says.

The Wellcome Collection is part library, part exhibition space, part everything in between. Built to showcase the ephemera collected by nineteenth century entrepreneur Henry Wellcome, today it’s housed in a clean, crisp building and explores “the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future.”(1). Many of the thousands upon thousands of objects, books and artworks Wellcome collected reflect his particular interest in medicine, though there are plenty of other strange and unusual things too.


My first impression of the Reading Room is a bright, open, welcoming space. On the near side there are chairs, a big soft rug covering part of the floor, beanbags on steps leading up to a gallery; opposite, stationed around the contours of the room are pale green bookcases. They’re not low, but neither do they dominate the room, as you might see in a library, and there are fewer books than I expected. Do I notice the other things in the room? Abstractly, perhaps, but my first thought is for the books, and the first thing I notice about these are the way in which they are displayed and categorized.

As a well-seasoned bookseller, I’m used to book spaces being split up in particular ways. History goes here, biography there, cookery downstairs, fiction to the left, health to the right. Not rigid, but fairly traditionally structured(2). In the Reading Room, when you look closely, everything is a little strange, and for a moment I am a fish out of water.

‘Breath’ and ‘Body’ are the first categories I notice, each of these split into atypical subsections – ‘Breath’ has smoking, chemical warfare, respiratory system, asphyxia, drowning. And the books on the shelves are – in bookseller terms – a higgledy-piggledy mix, fiction and science and history and all subjects colliding. Confusion is my first feeling, but as I walk around the room, looking at the shelves and the categories and the books, it all makes a wonderful kind of sense. I like it. No, I love it.

“The design of public reading spaces in the modern British context created a form of social censorship, preventing readers from browsing and – through a culture of silence – trying to prevent them from discussing their reading in situ,” says book historian Mary Hammond(3). Wellcome’s Reading Room does the exact opposite of this: everything is open to invitation and begs interaction. “We’ve tried to fashion an environment full of intriguing things that will prompt and provoke you to respond,” the Reading Room Companion explains(4).

Which brings us to the human remains; because displayed along with the books and the reading spaces are artwork and objects, from medicine bottles to a daunting x-ray machine, straight jackets to a slice of human torso. Slightly gruesome paintings hang on the walls; each bookcase is topped with a packed display cabinet, while larger objects are placed amongst the tables and chairs throughout the room. Everything, from the books to the ephemera, have a medical or scientific bent, but they are also “all aspects of the every day that you can relate to.”(5) The room is at once a quiet comfortable space yet filled with evidence of the harder sides of the human condition.

One of the things that appeals to me most about the Reading Room’s space is the aspect of discoverability. Curating the books – and the objects – in the way that they have makes it easy to find and discover topics and titles you never thought about before. This, I think, is the essence of curating a good book space. But how best to use space to encourage discoverability?

Waterstones shop manager Andrew Forster defines the purpose of his book space as “to meet our customers’ expectations and aspirations… [and] to be a commercial space which maximizes our sales… We also want to take customers on a journey and let them discover books and delight in finding something they had read about, or just like the look of.”(6) They arrange books “logically” (6), carefully consider “adjacencies” (6), and ensure “merchandising is interesting, exciting and relevant.”(6)

Is Waterstones a “normal” book space? Alongside libraries, I imagine bookshops are potentially the most commonly accessed book spaces in the UK. Bookshops are becoming increasingly diverse, though – many now include cafes and non-book products, seeking to make themselves community hubs and places for conversation. Plus, book spaces are forever changing and adapting, as Marion Akehurst, manager of the Wellcome Shop attests: “We’ve changed the shop quite a lot [since the Collection opened in 2007] in response to learning what our visitors are interested in, and what works.”(7)

The Wellcome Shop uses its space in a different way again. It’s both a more typical book space than the Reading Room, yet simultaneously melds within it the ideas and concepts that might have been discovered there. One part contains more expected book categories – children’s, popular science, history of medicine, philosophies – but then there are shelves of books that again bring together more unusual themes: morbidity, art in nature. It possesses a sort of duality: bookshop appeal, but with the purpose of exploration; “a wide and changing selection of books to complement the themes of Wellcome Collection.”(8)

The purpose of a book space determines its organization and content, in turn determining impact it has on its users and how discoverabilty is created. Book spaces can be a “place for retreat, study and meditation,”(9) a place to “examine the physical books at leisure, and also make unexpected discoveries when browsing the shelves,”(10) or – as in the case of Wellcome’s Reading Room, provide “points of departure for conversation and other shared activities… an environment full of intriguing things that will prompt and provoke you to respond.”(3)

The Sumerians called their book curators “ordainers of the universe”(11) and I rather like this description: the question is, what universe do you want to create and what do want others to discover within it?

References

(1) The Wellcome Collection. About Wellcome Collection. [accessed 14/10/15] Available from: http://wellcomecollection.org/what-we-do/about-wellcome-collection
(2) How exactly do I define ‘traditional’? Well, like a bookshop: an initial division of children’s books and adults, each of these categories subdivided into fiction and non-fiction, those further divided into subject areas or genres within them.
(3) Hammond, M. Howsam, L, editor. The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2015.
(4) Faherty, A. Reading Room Companion. London: Wellcome Trust; 2014.
(5) In conversation with Anna Faherty, 9/10/15.
(6) Andrew Forster, Waterstones Truro, by email 14/10/15.
(7) Marion Akehurst, manager, Wellcome Blackwells, by email 15/10/15.
(8) The Wellcome Collection. The Wellcome Shop. [accessed 14/10/15]. Available from: http://wellcomecollection.org/visit-us/wellcome-shop
(9) Chartier, R. Finkelstein, D and McCleery, A, editors. The Book History Reader. 2nd edition. Oxon: Routledge; 2006.
(10) Smith, K. The Publishing Business: From p-books to e-books. Lausanne: AVA Publishing SA; 2012.
(11) Manguel, A. A History of Reading. London: Penguin Books; 1997.