Martha Rosler Library ... It has the quality of a memory hoard. Photograph: Public domain
If you are in Edinburgh and desperate to step out of the festival craziness for a quiet read, you might want to visit the Martha Rosler Library on Cockburn Street. Its materials are, admittedly, organised a little differently from the average public library. The first books you encounter are political texts - a huge collection of radical tracts and studies, many of them analysing American foreign policy.
Wander deeper into the library, relax into its studious atmosphere, with potted plants on top of stuffed bookshelves and quiet reading corners, and you will find volumes on history, economics, and art - all with their classifications marked on the spines, just like any university library.
In fact, this is the personal book collection of one woman, the American artist Martha Rosler. Her presentation of it in the form a useful working library is perhaps the perfect embodiment of this radical artist's vision. It has the quality of a memory hoard, an archive of the marginalised but surviving American left.
On the train to Edinburgh I was reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, an epic fiction in which American workers defy the wonderfully named capitalist dynasty, the Vibe family. There's a lot more in it too - airship battles, Broadway, the fourth dimension - but this great American novelist feels the need in this decade, like Rosler, to bear witness to a lost history of resistance within the US. You may even find Against the Day in Rosler's library.
