display
In Juli Zeh's new novel, “About People”, the main character Dora comes across an extensive warehouse of cotton bags while cleaning up her kitchen.
She and her friend Robert have committed to this type of bag “because they could be recycled.
At least theoretically. "
Dora then counts the inventory of cotton bags and comes to over 30, bought in various book and health food stores.
Then she remembers hearing on the radio “that making a cotton bag uses a lot more energy than making a plastic bag.
You have to use every cotton bag at least 130 times to make it more environmentally friendly than plastic bags. "
Now Dora is flabbergasted and does the math: “With thirty cotton bags and 130 uses each, she had 3,900 purchases that she still had to do to do something good for the environment.
With an average of three purchases a week, that could be done in 25 years.
Provided that there was never another cotton bag in the future. "
display
It is not known how often the Leipzig book historian and publisher Mark Lehmstedt wanted to go shopping with his 3000 different shopping bags from the book trade.
One thing is certain: his bag-collecting frenzy did not serve any climate goals, but was only sustainable enough to make disposable items culturally relevant at some point.
The Lehmstedt Collection
Lehmstedt's collection of over two decades was recently included in the German Museum of Books and Writing, a department of the German National Library.
Here the bags are to be explored as ephemeral testimonies to the book trade culture.
You can also marvel at the “book bags” in the catalog (Lehmstedt-Verlag, 120 pages, 20 euros) and find out: whether paper or plastic, linen or jute - book bags have never been just practical transport containers, they have always been eloquent advertising spaces.
They reveal that for decades no slogan was too leisurely in the industry (“reading happiness to carry on”), no motto too spontaneous-feminist (“reading instead of cleaning”) and no calendar saying was too stupid: “Reading is an adventure in the head”.
Cat content from Schöffling-Verlag
Source: Lehmstadt Verlag
For everyone who likes to carry a statement home
Source: Lehmstadt Verlag
Indestructible: the motto bag
Source: Lehmstadt Verlag
When Thalia was still betting on celebrities
Source: Lehmstadt Verlag
GDR minimalism
Source: Lehmstadt Verlag
One reads better from the outside: Bag model of a time thousand and one
Source: Lehmstadt Verlag
The bag edition of two thousand and one
Source: Lehmstadt Verlag
The gym bag look for hipsters
Source: Lehmstadt Verlag
Lehmstedt has sorted its book bags according to thematic criteria;
sometimes they show shop logos and publisher's signets, sometimes reading people, sometimes animals (preferably owls).
Sometimes you can see cat tongues on the bags (Schöffling), sometimes rhymes (“When I read, I don't make cheese”), sometimes celebrities: “Meet Goethe”.
Goethe on a plastic bag from Thalia - why this could set cognitive dissonances among educated citizens will have to be explained to future generations with lots of footnotes and “myths of everyday life” (Roland Barthes).
The series of two thousand and one plastic bags was legendary, parallel to spectacular editions such as Samuel Pepys' diaries or Gottfried Schnabel's “Insel Felsenburg”.
display
Oh, bags.
Only when they slowly disappear from the cityscape with retailers do we notice the cultural technology that is lost with them.
Transporting Buchheim by hand in a bag with two handles is going out of fashion and in some places has come to a standstill during the lockdown weeks.
The notorious book fair bags, in which delicate schoolgirl shoulders carry brochures halfway through the exhibition halls, have not been seen since 2019.
As well as?
There hasn't been a single book fair since then.
The decline of the bookshop bag took place parallel to the rise of the mail order book packaging.
He started with the “unboxing” cult on YouTube, the video genre that internet behavioral researchers like to refer to as a “phenomenon” like everything they don't understand: people enthusiastically show each other respect and applause (vulgo: likes and hearts) for the fact that other people unwrap something hyper-enthusiastic.
For example a book.
The unboxing phenomenon
The unboxing phenomenon may have something to do with cultural imprinting (children's birthday parties!), A fetish for everything haptic in digital space and possibly even with our hunter-gatherer genes (“Haul” is the name of the unboxing videos in the scene: “Derived from From the English
haul
for “catch”, “yield” or “fish
haul
”, these videos are modern forms of displaying stolen consumer goods, ”explains Wikipedia).
You are of course also marketing that presents your own role in relation to the book (as an author, critic, influencer or whoever) performatively.
In the practice of book bloggers, book tubers and bookstagramers, the booty is primarily to do with wrapping cardboard and shipping packaging waste, because influencers, like us literary critics, are sent books free to the door.
The digital book will no longer need any containers.
Then bags of books in the museum will tell us what there was to experience while “catching up”.
And what embarrassing bag one would rather scurry home with than strut home.