Sacred Shelves

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 Book as Icon

Books hold power — not only because of what they contain, but because of what they are. Their form, permanence, and tangibility confer authority. A bound volume carries weight in every sense. In library culture, that weight becomes a kind of sanctity. Shelves of books evoke tradition, discipline, legitimacy. They signal that knowledge is present — and more importantly, that it has been ordered, preserved, and domesticated.

This is not a neutral affection. It is an epistemic choice, sedimented over centuries. The book is not just one technology among many; it has become the symbolic center of the library's identity.

In this role, it is rarely questioned. It is revered. And this reverence is not innocent.

When the material book becomes sacred, the library risks falling into a form of epistemological fetishism: treating the object as more important than the knowledge it mediates — or worse, as the only acceptable form of that knowledge. The book becomes a proxy for validity. Its presence signifies value, while the absence of a spine, a page, or a title, marks a void. Not a different knowledge, but a lack.

The Architecture of Worship

The physical structure of the library reflects this prioritization. Shelves dominate space. Catalogs are designed to describe bound units. Storage, circulation, acquisition — every operational layer assumes the book as its atomic element.

Even when a book is outdated or unused, its removal can feel sacrilegious. Institutions preserve them not necessarily because they are consulted, but because they confer a sense of cultural gravity. A library without books is, in many professional imaginaries, not a library at all — no matter what else it contains.

Meanwhile, other knowledge forms struggle to enter. Oral memory, ritual, performance, and embodied practices — these do not align neatly with shelving systems or MARC fields. They resist cataloging. They cannot be loaned or digitized without stripping them of context, rhythm, and breath.

This problem is not solved by digitization. In fact, digital libraries often replicate —and reinforce— the literocentric scaffolding of their physical counterparts. E-books still mimic pages. Metadata fields still expect authors, titles, and ISBNs. The file replaces the volume, but the logic of textual centrality remains intact. Nothing fundamental shifts. The infrastructure remains book-shaped.

Consecration and Erasure

This worship of the book has serious consequences. When one material format is allowed to define what counts as preservable —and by extension, valuable— entire worlds of knowledge are excluded.

A chant cannot be cataloged like a monograph. A gesture cannot be preserved through bibliographic citation. A smell, a dance, a silence — these forms of knowing, though vital in many oral and ecological traditions, cannot be printed, bound, and shelved. And so they vanish from the institutional record.

Library systems, even unintentionally, perform acts of epistemic violence. They exclude what they cannot hold. They erase what they cannot describe. They silence what they cannot standardize.

And this is not merely a problem of inclusion. It is a deeper ontological question: What do libraries believe knowledge is? What kinds of memory are they built to sustain? What forms of truth do they honor — and which ones do they quietly discard?

Beyond the Pedestal

This is not an argument against books. It is an argument against their deification.

Books have served —and continue to serve— as vital vessels of human thought. But when libraries elevate them above all other knowledge systems, they conflate a medium with a monopoly. They perpetuate the false belief that to preserve knowledge is to collect pages. That to remember is to bind. That to know is to read.

We must unlearn this.

If libraries are to survive as relevant memory institutions —not relics of print modernity— they must relinquish their dependency on the book as their epistemic foundation. This does not mean discarding it. It means decentering it. Making space for archives that hum, for catalogs that dance, for shelves that echo with breath and rupture.

Only then can the library become more than a monument to paper. It can become a living architecture of plurality — a space where books are honored, but not worshipped.