We set out to explore Libraries (and Bookish Love) in Film and Literature with our 11th Issue. Our Torchlight Spotlight shines on an essay by Dr Maxine Berntsen that provokes us to think about the privilege of learning to read, the responsibility of asking questions around what we read and about relationships. The act of reading is artfully picked up and strengthened by Saumyananda Sahi in ‘Travels with an open book on my lap’ which transports us into film and text plots around reading where the language is understood as ‘a form of life’. At this Spotlight, we also read Venita Coelho who straddles both forms by writing novels as well as scripts and what this line stepping means to her creative self that adds to bookish love.
In Chiaroscuro, we welcome Jaya Modi a young designer who responded to her reading of ‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges and created a set of booklets that attempts to encapsulate some of Borges’ ideas as explored in his own texts. Jane Sahi writes about shame and pride in literacy, covering an arc of examples from text and film and compels us to think about our own positions around literacy as a form of empowerment. Alia Sinha returns with a Readerly Problem that has reference to how horror and fantasy films always use arcane books as plot devices, to fix supernatural problems and Beena Choksi brings to On The Same Page critical ideas and examples of access of reading content to prisoners around the world. Merle Almeida documents and reflects on what is lost and found in adaptation when we shift from text to film and back again and finally some folk at Bookworm, explored how children see librarians in Picture Books and what that teaches those of us whose work revolves around children’s libraries and bringing books and children together.
These diverse articles touch on some of the many issues around having access to texts in varied settings and they include how these encounters have been represented imaginatively in word and image.
Jane Sahi & Sujata Noronha
October, 2019