Section
Letters from the library
"Letters from the library" is a regular and bilingual column published since 2020 on the blog of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands (CDF). In it, the author, working as the coordinator of the Library, Archive & Museum area of the institution between 2018 and 2023, shares the stories behind many documents in the collection. Since 2022, the column is published in Galapagueana. The contents of the letters can be downloaded from the section "Galapagueana to take away"
#23. A Merlenesque story [In memoriam]
Godfrey Merlen was one of the scientists with the largest and longest presence at the Charles Darwin Research Station ― and in the Galapagos. His particular profile was easily recognizable from afar in Puerto Ayora. The same is true of his work, which is everywhere to be found in the CDF Library, Archives & Museum...
#22. The puzzle of the fragmented memory
Those of us who work in the field of knowledge and memory management have various kinds of inside jokes to define what we do...
#21. Dinosaurs in Mars
Disinformation and fake news are not new things, born in the heat of the Internet and the ubiquitous social networks. They have existed since human beings are human beings, and since our species had the capacity to fantasize...
#20. Her work, his fame
One of the most interesting items held in the special collections of the CDF Library is a folder ―looking luxurious enough to intimidate me, I must confess― containing a series of the famous "Gould prints"...
#19. On chairs and terraces
There they were. Two white chairs. Foldable. Of plastic. Leaning, both, against the wall in a corner of the museum of the Station...
#18. The hands of the artist
There are stories that are not written. And yet they are there. It happens frequently with illustrations...
#17. Glances from the other side of time
Libraries, archives and museums are institutions that manage knowledge and memory. In recent times, with information becoming the engine of a new socio-political paradigm...
#16. Story of a death in a duel with pistols
It is well known that the Galapagos Islands are worthy of some dark pages ―one could even say macabre― in the Great Book of History...
#15. Little wings falling like flakes
In the CDF Archive, it is not unusual to open a box or lift a folder and witness a small (or large) amount of dust falls...
#14. Palimpsests
Academic texts on history of the book say that during the Middle Ages, when Europe wrote on parchment and paper was still nothing more than an exotic resource in the hands of the Arabs...
#13. The librarian's footprints
It happened about three years ago. In a corner of the desk I use in the library of the Charles Darwin Research Station, I found an old card...
#12. With a little sea lion on the lap (II)
Almost two years ago, in the third installment of this series of letters, I wrote that the oldest collection of photos in the CDF Archive to date is the so-called "Nourmahal album"...
#11. Hunting the wild bull
Not everything we store in our archives and libraries displays trustworthy information or reliably documents an event. There is, in our knowledge and memory repositories, a lot of information that is far from being "true"...
#10. A chest full of treasures
—We found a huge trunk under the stairs. Nobody remembers who put it there. It looks like it has videotapes in it. Shall we bring it to you…?
#09. A green heart
Sometimes I find it difficult to understand what I read. I try to find fragments of my old knowledge of palaeography in the back of my memory, but to no use...
#08. A story in a picture
I remove the slide from the plastic sheet, which stores other nineteen, all in consecutive order. I take a look at the small notes crowded on the edges of the plastic...
#07. In Kichwa. In Inuktikut
One goes over the spines of the documents that make up the collection of the CDF Library and comes across a small linguistic mixture...
#06. Everything is hidden in memory
The man, already aged but with a vitality that many twenty-somethings would want for themselves, walked with us the bunch of yards from the CDF library until the entrance to the "Station Beach"...
#05. Darwin at the Tower of Babel
The figure of Charles Darwin —Darwin the scientific, but also the thinker, the believer, the citizen— has attracted the attention of specialists and laymen alike for more than a century...
#04. Georgina's diary
The notebook was wrapped in a light blue cardboard, neatly folded for protection. There, inside that sort of box, it had been invisible for years. No one seemed to have requested it for reading in the library's main room...
#03. With a little sea lion on the lap (I)
The CDF Archive has an audiovisual section that, while not extensive, is rich in content. It is a collection that includes hundreds of photographs, slides from all eras...
#02. In the bathroom
The history of bathroom reading is a history still to be written. I speak of "history" because I assume that, from that glorious moment in the past when humans invented the toilet or some similar device in which to sit down, the need to read appeared...
#01. A love postcard
It was a postcard. It appeared inside one of several boxes of old papers that someone decided to discard at the CDF and, therefore, came first to my hands to check if there was something useful or valuable for the archive. And there was plenty of that...
Text & picture: Edgardo Civallero (edgardo.civallero@fcdarwin.org.ec).
Publication date: 1 December 2022
Last update: 1 October 2023