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Annette Michelson, 
Bookshelves on the Upper West Side
in 1976

Many, many, words lined up in many, many books belonging to a founding editor of the journal October trigger a Benjaminian reverie around libraries and book collecting. Benjamin’s short essay speaks of the joys of collecting books. Of buying, borrowing and (pretty much) stealing them in the act of borrowing. Michelson’s book-spines, turned toward the viewer, tell us a few explicit stories; Kurt Schwitters, Beethoven, Jasper Johns are visible and legible. But mostly the books and journals are mute: just books and books and books and journals and…. The top shelf is loaded with what seems to be several hundred copies of a scholarly journal: it has the size, heft and un-glamour of a just such a 1970’s document. Something like the unvarnished matt bindings of New German Critique. Down toward the bottom many months worth of magazines turn narrow spines toward the camera while third shelf down, middle of shelf; those could be a collection of Paris Reviews. And then we run out of shelves! Badly so, with perilous, ready to topple, piles on chair and end tables. And then we have, or in fact do not have, the absent reader. Michelson’s empty rocking chair, at rest, blankly sits before us. Yet we do have her presence. Her depth of intellect and voracious cultural interest is the imposing personality marking the scene. Not depressive here, instead the clutter of read or unread books describe or diagram the owner’s intellectual idiom: the personal, intellectual contour of the friend of the smart Jewish girl with a typewriter, with whom –in 1976 as luck might have it– Michelson inaugurated a journal, a collection of words and pictures after all, that transformed New York cultural and intellectual life for ever

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