If you have been to the new Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick Site in Cambridge, you will probably have seen the three vitrines filled with porcelain by the potter Edmund de Waal, which are sunk below the paving just outside the entrance. Inside the building, there is another piece by de Waal: atlas, a wall-mounted vitrine divided into multiple shelves, on which are 120 lids from vessels he has made and broken because they were ‘not quite right’. Yesterday, I picked up a beautifully produced leaflet about these works, in which de Waal writes movingly about his motivations. Of the wall-mounted vitrine (pictured above, in the leaflet), which works so well in the space it occupies, he says:

‘If the structure of the vitrine looks familiar, it is because it is a gentle echo of a manuscript page with texts, footnotes and commentaries in intimate conjunction.’

De Waal intended this and the other vitrines, he reveals, as ‘a kind of archive’, designed for a ‘site full of libraries and archives, and the people who care about libraries and archives’. Located at the threshold to the building, as well as at the heart of the building’s airy atrium, de Waal’s elegant vitrines remind us that our engagement with the materiality of pages, archives, and libraries, while often frustrating and challenging, can also be intensely beautiful.

One day over lunch last week, a colleague asked me if I had a spare copy of Jane Austen’ s Northanger Abbey that she could borrow for an undergraduate seminar she was teaching that afternoon. When I located it on my bookshelf, I realised it was full of my own undergraduate annotations. Oh, the embarrassment… By coincidence, I had been reading Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, in which a version of the author himself meets a fictional artist, who wants to paint his portrait. In conversation with my colleague, I remembered this moment:

‘Jed took a few photos of the room as a whole. As he saw Jed approach the tables, Houellebecq suddenly became nervous.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t look at your manuscripts, I know you hate that. However…’ he thought for a moment, ‘I’d like to see what your annotations and corrections look like.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘I’m not looking at the content, not at all. It’s just to have an idea of the geometry of it all. I promise you that in the painting no one will recognise the words.’

Reticently, Houellebecq took out a few sheets of paper. There were very few crossings-out, but numerous asterisks in the middle of the text, accompanied by arrows that led to new blocks of text, some in the margin, others on separate sheets. Inside these blocks, which were roughly rectangular, new asterisks led towards other blocks, forming a sort of tree diagram. The handwriting was slanting, almost illegible. Houellebecq didn’t take his eyes off Jed all the time he was taking pictures, and sighed with visible relief when he moved away from the table. On leaving the room, he closed the door carefully behind him.’

from Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. by Gavin Bowd (London: William Heinemann, 2011) pp. 107-8.