I’ve been toying with the idea of changing the name of this space for a while now. On the one hand, it doesn’t matter that much: I’ve seen some of my subscriptions go through multiple incarnations. On the rare occasions where I google someone’s newsletter, I search by author rather than title. And Substack itself emphasizes writers themselves, as opposed to the names of the sites they post on. So it’s not such a big deal.

In my case, my original title was a pun on the idea of a commonplace book. I’m not sure that that choice necessarily made much sense, given that commonplace books were far more common in the 18th and 19th centuries than they are today. And while “commonplace” itself is a rhetorical term1, its contemporary connotation is one of ordinariness. That means that, while the title of my Substack holds certain meaning for me, that meaning is probably not accessible to many of the people who visit it. And that’s not a great sign.

Finally, I feel that the vibe of my site has shifted a bit over the past year or so. If you visit regularly, you might notice that I’ve focused less of my energy on everyday blogging in favor of multi-part series, book reviews, etc. I tend to think of that latter activity as something like “knowledge management.” That is, I’m not just not taking notes and thinking out loud; I’m doing those things with a purpose, thinking ahead to the book manuscript that I want to write. And while I expect this space will always be a mix, I find myself itching to move my status from “getting ready to write a book” to “writing a book.” That means working with broader ideas, thinking about issues of scope, and changing my title is one way of subtly nudging myself in that direction.

German cultural critic Walter Benjamin has a somewhat obscure essay whose title I borrowed for this post, “Unpacking my Library.” It’s a personal reflection prompted by the literal fact of moving his book collection from one place to another, although I like the double entendre of “unpacking,” which is used occasionally as a synonym for interpreting and/or explicating. In other words, there’s a case to be made that any piece of academic writing involves the author(s) unpacking their libraries2.

I used Benjamin’s essay in my first book, because the idea of the collection struck me as an interesting midpoint between narrative and database. I’m not a collector in Benjamin’s sense—books are means rather than ends for me, for the most part—but collection is an activity that bridges the gap between those media categories. That is, collectors hold themselves responsible for “completing the set” in a formal (database) sense—this is part of what it means to be a completionist. At the same time, the individual items in one’s collection often carry stories and investments on the part of the collector. I can look over my own shelves and I don’t just see my books for the information or ideas they contain; I often still remember when, how, and why I acquired them, how they made me feel, and so on. As Benjamin remarks towards the end of his essay, it’s “Not that [books] come alive in [the collector]; it is he who lives in them.”

There’s another line that caught me up on this particular journey through Benjamin’s essay. He notes that “Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.” I don’t know that I’d describe myself as dissatisfied per se, but I’ve grown increasingly aware of a gap on my personal bookshelves that’s waiting for the book I’ve been slowly working on for the past couple of years. It’s time to get going on that. More soon.