Preface: In and Out of the Library
In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls place a ‘concretion of value’. By that measure, a good library is clearly and intensely a place. Like all ‘real’ places, it is more significant every day as physical space dissolves into the virtual with the increasing speed of bytes and vehicles. But is the space of the ‘real’ library what it appears to be? This issue of Torchlight explores the question from various perspectives, and across diverse locations and forms of enquiry.
We read the library’s immovability in Kiran Vaghela’s Gujarati prose-poem inspired by the haibun form, as a valued guarantee of its continuity in time (‘…it is still there’). As a counterpoint, Alia Sinha’s graphic meditation in the ‘Readerly Problem’ floats on the hope tha...