The Spiral Library

About this work

The upper half belongs to the books. Red-brown leather bindings turn in a wide spiral that tightens to a small curl at its centre, and the eye follows it inward almost without trying. Then it is thrown out again: open books and loose pages fly towards the upper right, while a fine stream of pale pages, or perhaps birds, sweeps across the upper left. The lower third is calmer, with golden sand dunes softly rippled. At lower left a cream stone doorway with an arched red-brown wooden door stands alone, a trail of footprints leading to it. Small amber clouds line the horizon. Terracotta and ochre gold glow warmly against the deep blue. Close up, the old bindings and fluttering page edges reward a long look. From a distance it is one great swirl over a quiet desert, dreamlike and literary.

Long before printed books, Greek and Roman speakers trained their memory by imagining a building and placing each idea in a room along a route. The method of loci, as it came to be called, treats memory as a place you walk through, and this picture plays a similar game: a door in the sand, and a library that has come loose into the sky. Surrealist writers of the 1920s were drawn to such scenes, where thought, memory and dream share one landscape. The coil of books tightens much like a golden-ratio spiral, the curve tied to 1.618 and to the Fibonacci numbers, in which every step is the sum of the two before it.

Book lovers will find it at home in a study, a library corner or above a reading chair. It also brings warmth to a hallway that leads to a quieter room. Cream, terracotta, warm ochre and deep navy walls all bring out its contrast. A dark walnut or antique gold frame suits the leather bindings, and a cream mat adds a classic, library-like finish. Warm lamplight flatters the terracotta tones in the evening. A size of 50 × 75 cm or larger lets the small pages read clearly. For a set, look at The Galaxy Doorway, which shares the lone door, and The Lantern Bridge. The file prints sharply to roughly 91 cm on the long edge at 300 dpi.