Dead Library

OSA Archivum has already organized several exhibitions on preservation, classification, collection, and sharing. It also ran projects involving unread books. The Dead Library is the latest event in the series.

The Dead Library exhibition is an experiment in modeling holdings of Hungarian libraries that have not been read since 1989. For the purposes of the exhibition we have selected five thousand books that were published between 1945 and 1989, in Hungary, in Hungarian, on topics of general interest, which have not been checked out since 1989.

The exhibition is a library installation, showing a typical local library. The 300-square-meter space is dominated by bookshelves, on which the books are arranged in the standard library thematic order from technical and agricultural works through youth literature to arts and fiction. The only difference between a traditional library and the Dead Library is that visitors will find only unread books here—ones that have not been checked out since 1989 (or longer). Visitors taking one book or another off the shelves will become their first readers in decades. We hope that the Dead Library will inspire public thinking on libraries and archives, the preservation and re-use of information, and, by making the thousands of books available for browsing and reading, it will give visitors and readers the exceptional experience of re-discovering books otherwise destined for oblivion.

We wish to express our gratitude to the management and staff of ELTE University Library for making their huge collection available for selection and their invaluable advice during the work.