Reading Is Queen

This note is part of a series that critiques the cult of literacy in libraries — exposing how reading, writing, and the book have been crowned as the only valid forms of knowledge, while everything else is silenced, excluded, or reshaped to fit the page. Check all the notes in this section's index.

The Spell of the Page

In the modern library, reading is not just a practice — it is a virtue.

It is the gateway to inclusion, the proof of education, the metric of intelligence, and the primary condition for access. Entire library systems are built on the assumption that literacy —narrowly defined as the ability to decode and reproduce written language— is both natural and necessary.

It is not.

Reading is not universal. It is not neutral. It is not innocent. It is a skill born of a specific historical process, developed under specific power structures, and institutionalized through systems that have long excluded or erased other ways of knowing.

And yet in most libraries, reading still reigns supreme.

Libraries as Shrines to Literacy

Public libraries boast about reading programs, reading challenges, reading corners. Catalogs assume that users can spell, type, and search. Storytime is designed to create future readers, not future listeners or rememberers. Even oral storytelling, when it exists, is framed as a gateway drug to literacy — not as a legitimate epistemology in its own right.

The architecture reinforces it. Shelves rise like altars. Signage speaks in text. Interfaces demand input in keywords. The entire spatial and technological design is built to reward the literate, and confuse or exclude everyone else.

And behind the smiling posters and inclusive slogans, there is a deeper message: if you want to belong here, you must read. You must learn to. You must pretend to. You must prove it. Every service, every program, every interaction bends toward this unspoken demand.

When someone enters a library and cannot read —or does not want to— the institution does not adapt. It corrects them. It enrolls them in a program. It hands them a pamphlet. It diagnoses, remediates, disciplines. The non-reader becomes a problem to solve. A target for intervention. A broken user.

Rarely —although there are exceptions— does the institution ask whether it might be the one that is illiterate. Illiterate in gesture, in listening, in memory that doesn't live on paper. Illiterate in forms of presence, performance, and knowing that cannot be scanned, cataloged, or filed away.

Instead, the shrine keeps worshipping. And the altar keeps burning. And the only prayer that counts is the one that's written.

What Gets Collected, What Gets Funded

Library collections are fundamentally literate collections.

The vast majority of funds, shelf space, and acquisition infrastructure is dedicated to books and printed documents. Reports. Articles. Manuscripts. Anything that sits still on a shelf and behaves like text. Materials that are not text-based —sound, movement, silence, gesture— are generally exceptions, curiosities, or outreach tools. Not knowledge.

They're filed under "diversity," not epistemology. They are used to attract funding, entertain children, or showcase "community engagement." But rarely, if ever, are they cataloged as core knowledge systems — let alone treated with the same rigor, budget, or permanence.

Even digital collections replicate this bias. Millions are invested in e-books, digital monographs, full-text databases. But oral archives remain underfunded, uncataloged, and hard to access — if they exist at all. Soundscapes, ceremonies, hand signs, memory routes — they vanish before they are even recognized as holdings.

The idea that knowledge must be readable —in print, on a screen, in a citation— is never questioned. It is treated as obvious, inevitable, correct.

But it isn't. It's a choice. And it has consequences.

What Is Lost When Reading Rules

When reading is the primary gateway, what gets excluded?

Whole traditions of embodied memory, intergenerational transmission, and ecological storytelling. Ways of knowing that pulse through hands, breath, timing — not paper. Communities that teach through song, ritual, scent, or silence. Elders who carry entire histories in cadence, gesture, and presence. Individuals who know, deeply and precisely, but whose knowledge does not live on the page — and never needed to.

These aren't alternative knowledges. They are other epistemologies —complete, coherent, tested over centuries— that simply do not speak in paragraphs.

In privileging literacy, libraries have often participated —willingly or not— in a broader system of epistemicide: the slow, systemic killing of other ways of knowing. A knowledge death not through fire or theft, but through omission, substitution, and neglect.

Of course, there are historical reasons for such privileging of literacy. Libraries were born as "containers of books," temples to the written word. But if they expect to be spaces of information, knowledge, and memory —and not just mausoleums of text— they have to abandon that position. Or at least unlearn it.

Because when reading rules, everything else begs for recognition. Or dies waiting.

Toward a Post-Literate Imagination

This is not a call to abandon reading. It is a call to dethrone it.

To unseat it from its pedestal as the ultimate proof of intelligence, the gold standard of learning, the prerequisite for legitimacy. To stop pretending that reading is the only path to meaning, the only test of knowledge, the only acceptable form of intellectual labor. To build libraries that do not confuse "reading access" with "knowledge access." Because they are not the same.

Reading is a tool. A powerful one. But it is not neutral, and it is not universal. And when a single tool becomes a requirement, it stops being a tool and becomes a gate.

What if a library could be a place to listen? To feel? To remember with the body, not the page? To transmit instead of transcribe? What if meaning didn't have to be stored — only carried, sung, shared, repeated?

What if presence was enough?

Until we break the spell of reading-as-virtue —the quiet dogma that equates literacy with worth— libraries will remain temples to a single epistemology. And every other one will have to beg for entry.

Or sneak in through the cracks.