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Books display their wounds

Among the bibliographic jewels of the University of Oviedo there are books seriously damaged by humidity, gnawed by rats, cockroaches or moths, scribbled, torn and even with the pages nailed by some censor. The Central Library of the University takes great care of these copies, which it has not been able to “heal” and which testify to its fragility and defenselessness. Exceptionally, throughout this month of June, the library removes 200 of these volumes from its shelves and shows them in an exhibition entitled “Badly Injured” and which is part of a broader initiative, promoted by the REBIUN Bibliographic Heritage Group, which will be replicated throughout the country.

In Oviedo the exhibition was inaugurated yesterday with the presence of the rector, Ignatius Villaverde, who spoke about how “the memory of a University is its library” and how these have become “the recollection spaces that we lay people have left.” “Badly wounded” is, said the Rector, an act of reparation towards those books that life has treated badly. “We owed it to them,” he admitted, and praised the “people full of sensitivity and vocation” involved in a project with which they want to teach “the world that books also suffer and, therefore, we must take care of them and take care, above all, their places for healing, which are libraries”.

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A worm-eaten book and two others censored, one with nailed pages and another with a stud. | Irma Collin


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Throughout the presentation, he planned for the Central Library of the University the specter of the great fire of 1934, which devastated the building and its funds. In the “Badly Injured” display cases you can see some of the few books that escaped burning because they were being used in the Science Cabinet. Maria Jose Ferrerthe head of the library section and curator of the exhibition, recalled that the books that are now kept in Oviedo come from donations and acquisitions made after 1935. Among them, some arrived very battered and others became “sick” during their stay in her.

“Books are fragile, delicate and sometimes unrecoverable,” said the director of the university library, Faust Gonzalez, but although paper is doomed to disappear, “the library, as an institution, can remain despite the greatest catastrophes”. “Sooner or later all these funds will end up succumbing,” Ferrer resigned himself. Even knowing that, it is important to preserve books for as long as possible and that is “a constant task”. “The future will thank us,” he declared. The purpose of “Malheridos” is that, that people become aware of the dangers that threaten books, whether it is a leak, as it happened not long ago, that soaks the volumes of a shelf, a coffee that spills unexpectedly on a page, the wax of the candles falling on them during reading, the droppings of cockroaches or their bites.

“Badly wounded” is structured in six sections that exemplify all that variety of damages. The first is dedicated to deterioration caused by the passage of time, light, pollution or heat; the second, to the little animals that feed on books; the third, to misuse, whether they are underlined with fluorescent markers or daubed hearts on the pages; the fourth deals with “massive destruction”, and in it the protagonist is the fire of 1934; the fifth is the most surprising, because it shows the different ways and the viciousness with which the censors tried to silence the voice of the books, holding them with nails that prevented them from being opened or expurgating them in a thousand ways. Along with these volumes, among which treatises on physics alternate with those on sexuality, political texts and Voltaire’s “Emilio”, the indexes of prohibited books are shown. The sixth and last chapter is dedicated to the survivors, the books whose expert hands, such as those of the old restoration workshop of the nuns of San Pelayo or that of Encuadernaciones Inclán, fortunately managed to prolong their lives.

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