The Museum of Loneliness project Fragments of the Lost Library will be displayed next week in a pop-up shop. It is an especially assembled collection of 100 numbered books drawn from an eclectic base. Most have some value in their own right as collectible editions. The 100 books are annotated in a catalogue and each has a numbered MoL bookplate. As well as an exercise in cataloguing, the project has grown into a form of creative curating, with a structure and surrogate biography (the book’s of a lifetime).
The Lost Library was conceived as a unit, but is for dispersal, with the books for sale, at a rising scale of £1-100.
The question is: with such a project, in the end, does it makes more sense to disperse the books – so they cease to exist as a collection – or better to find some way of keeping them together, as an act of cultural archeology? Now the exercise is done it has become unexpectedly transformed into a rather special and original form of curating, for which with time there will be a growing curiosity, not only to read about such a library but see it in place.
The choice seems important but MoL doesn’t have the experience to know what the right answer is.