Every bookshelf and museum exhibit tells a story. Just not always the truth

What we choose to show, and what we leave out, reveals more than we think

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As I’ve mentioned before, my sources of inspiration as a columnist have been wide and varied. Most of what I’ve crafted in nearly 30 years has been related to specific areas of interest. Every so often, I’ll be intrigued by someone or something that rests completely outside of these wheelhouses.

The inspiration for this week’s column falls within this latter designation.

I happened to see a recommendation on Instagram last October for a Netherlands-based company called STILT. They design and manufacture book cradles to display everything from rare books to small pamphlets and manuscripts. Unlike traditional book displays, they have created a line of “modular, collapsible, preservation-focused book supports.”

STILT’s book cradles have been exhibited in major cities and locations. The website includes photos of their products in the Rijksmuseum Research Library in Amsterdam, Saatchi Gallery in London, UK, Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris, France, the Armory in New York City and Pier 27 on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. They specialize in private home exhibitions, too.

It was the latter category that immediately caught my eye.

There’s a fair number of rare books in my personal collection that I’ve wanted to display. I’ve looked at different wooden and metal options, but never found one that made sense. STILT’s modular and collapsible design seemed like a great option.

I sent an email to the company a day or two later. Natasha Herman, who has owned and operated STILT since 2018, got back to me. It turns out that she was born and raised in the Montreal area, and had been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Herman started Redbone Bindery and worked as a freelance book conservator for the National Gallery of Canada. She’s also taught at the National Library of Australia, Auckland City Library in New Zealand and Canadian Museum of History.

Herman and her team were very pleasant and helpful. They provided me with a series of options for book cradles of varying sizes. They also suggested different accessories like weights, lecterns, hammocks for fragile items and anti-slip ledges. I opted for a book cradle and set of weights. Everything arrived just before Christmas, and I’ve been using them ever since.

While things were getting arranged with STILT, I started thinking about an obscure topic that kind of fit into the discussion of book cradles. That is, the politics of display.

This concept was analyzed in Sharon Macdonald’s The Politics of Display: Museums. Science, Culture (1998). A lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Sheffield, she and her book’s contributors examined the correlation between an audience and displayed item as well as the “political consequences of museum display.”

There’s always been a general assumption that museum exhibitions are politically neutral and impartial in nature. This may have been the case in previous centuries, but not in recent times. “Museums are thoroughly part of society, culture and politics,” Macdonald noted. “As such, they are sites in which we can see wider social, cultural and political battles played out.” That being said, she suggested they “are not, however, simply sites, battlegrounds, terrains, zones or spaces. Museum displays are also agencies for defining scientific knowledge for the public, and for harnessing science and technology to tell culturally authoritative stories about race, nation, progress and modernity.”

Is there some logic and reason to this argument? Yes.

Tracy Lang Teslow wrote in one chapter about the Field Museum of Natural History’s 1933 exhibit Races of Mankind, which contained 101 life-sized bronze sculptures “of the ‘principal’ human racial types.” Sculpted by Malvina Hoffman, who studied under Auguste Rodin, her “realistic art reified a racialist hierarchy more than any set of bones, chart of nose shapes, comparative scales or plaster figures ever did.” In Teslow’s view, this exhibition helped construct the “science of race and its public face.”

Meanwhile, Thomas F. Gieryn compared and contrasted a 1994 exhibition that received mixed reviews (Science in American Life at the National Museum of American History) with one that was never built (The Crossroads: The End of World War II, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War for the National Air and Space Museum). Both were conceived by the Smithsonian Institution, and the latter would have displayed the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb. (The cockpit and nose section arrived at the museum the following year, and the entire aircraft has been on display since 2003.)

Gieryn suggested “these controversial museum exhibitions are strategic sites for exploring bothersome epistemological-cum-political issues of metahistory because, in the end, only one Smithsonian exhibition of science (or of the Enola Gay) could be built.” Moreover, he felt that “history in museums becomes a kind of zero-sum matter” where only certain exhibits will be displayed, and others will be contested or ignored for personal or political reasons.

Putting aside the book’s obvious left-wing tropes, there does seem to be a politicized environment within modern museums in terms of what they will or won’t display. The same principle exists in private home exhibitions, too. An individual’s taste in rare books and documents will surely determine what he or she puts out in a room or office. That would involve those of us who own book cradles, display cases et al. Food for thought.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.