Summary Unpacking My Library: A Speech on Collecting by Benjamin Franklin
Unpacking My Library: A Speech on Collecting “Unpacking My Library: A Speech on Collecting,” was written by Walter Benjamin in the year 1931. In this essay he talks about the readers’ relationship to their books. Benjamin was moving from the house and life that he shared with his wife and stayed in a small furnished apartment. There he lived an isolated life. He narrates the experience in his personal library and out of the heaps in which they had been inaccessibly stored for the previous two years. He has a large number of books but there is no enough space in the room for those volumes. So, he is identifying the value of each book. Benjamin describes an important fact about the academic life. The journey of collecting books and documents during scholarly life are momentous not for their subjects, but of our selves. A project involves collection of data and understanding of the text. Same way Benjamin in unpacking his library was able to find a new order and meaning in his shel