Feelings of shame about unread books on the shelf? It doesn’t have to be that way – culture

Reading officially works like this: people start at the beginning, follow the given order and end the reading with the last sentence, a cultural practice that has been practiced for centuries, no, thousands of years. And a big lie. Because everyone knows: doubts set in with the first sentence. Is the text sagging? How does it end? Ever since people have been writing, and therefore since they have been reading, there has been a risk of abandonment and failure. It is almost always filled with shame and guilt, often even hidden from relatives, no, especially from loved ones, for decades.

Well, that doesn’t have to be the case. Unread books, these burdensome evidence of cultural inadequacy, can be sublimated and given the traces of supposedly intensive reading through simple interventions. Dog-ears and stains, underlining and false dedications transform any book, no matter how unread, into a “monument of cultural erudition and judgment.”

At least that is the promise of the “Book Handling Agency”, a post-structuralist-trained team of primarily US philologists, authors and journalists working around the magazine Cabinetwho invited people to the “Berlin Session” this summer evening after their successes in New York. In the back room of a Neukölln bar, a stone’s throw from Sonnenallee, they have set up a table with six young people in white lab coats with milling machines and liquids. In one corner are the service staff for literary fakes, including the Germanist Michel Chaouli from Indiana University in Bloomington, the US writer Tom McCarthy, the US-Turkish journalist Merve Emre and the Berlin Germanist Eva Geulen.

For an additional charge, there are absinthe spots, more underlining and fake author acknowledgments

Two hours are allotted for the book treatment, but that is far too little. The need is huge. Customer after customer crowds into the stuffy cubicle and gets advice on choosing “packages”. There is the basic treatment (simple folding of the spine, no wine stains), the deluxe version (multiple folding, machine corner sanding, cheap wine) or, which is what most choose, the Superb treatment, with absinthe stains, eight underlinings, scientific notes and fake acknowledgments or dedications from the author.

It turns out that not being read can affect any book: dissertations on Hegel, Walter Benjamin’s “Passage Work”, science fiction classics like William Sloane’s “The Rim of Morning”, adult romance Viking trash, a Beckett reader. The reasons for using the book treatment services are similarly diverse.

Sina Najafi, Cabinet-Publisher and editor-in-chief, also the initiator of the event, interviews every newcomer and shares the findings with everyone. A customer received the book as a gift from his mother, she’s coming to visit in three days, it’s impossible to get through it so quickly; another never reviewed a review copy. A customer has read a book, lost it, bought a new one and now wants to have it upgraded to her true reading status. Someone else has read the book, but it doesn’t show enough.

Impressionism is at the very beginning of the book treatment and goes back to the Irish writer Flann O’Brien. In 1941 he wrote in his constantly bad-tempered column in the Irish Times about a rich slob who had put unread books on his shelf. O’Brien, disgusted, recommended: Let’s set up a “book handling agency” that makes every book look as if its owner “practically lived, fed and slept with it for several months.” The price scale, the practical techniques, the templates for fake annotations (“Yes, but see Homer, Od. III, 151.”) or fictitious acknowledgments (“Your friend and admirer G. Bernard Shaw”) – all ideas from the Irish grouch.

Of course, he couldn’t have predicted Insta and Tiktok, which have reduced the average attention span to how long it takes to peel an egg. He knew nothing about dummy books, about Julius Deutschbauer’s nomadic project of the library of unread books, nothing about the fact that in trendy Berlin restaurants books are now displayed not with their backs forward, but with the cut, a final gesture of contempt for everyone who takes credit for their education.

And we don’t know whether he would have liked the Berlin event. Because actually, so says Cabinet-Editor Najafi, the agency doesn’t even exist in New York, the Berlin event is a pilot project. “We’re all fake,” interjects Eva Geulen, in a good mood after adding false annotations to Lytle Shaw’s architectural novel “The Mollino Set” that would make any AI green with envy: “Pirandello said that too and better” or, to a passage about Nietzsche’s embrace of a Turin carriage horse: “Banal.”

If Berlin works – and it looks like an evening with almost 40 books covered – a performance in New York should follow, Najafi said. Because the postmodern happening actually serves the very basic purpose of collecting donations for his magazine. Regardless of the success of the fundraising, something completely different is happening in Berlin: the courageous confrontation of readers with their unread books. This is the only way reconciliation can happen. Because it is precisely the unread works that open the “horizon to the future,” says German scholar Michel Chaouli: “They are the promise that I can change.”