This site is best viewed using a modern browser, at a high resolution, at full-screen (press F11, you may need to refresh the page afterwards).

Move your cursor over the labels to read the text.

The page will scroll right as you read through the labels, if you want to return to previous labels or skip forward, please use the horizontal scroll-bar at the bottom of the page. Your mouse scroll-wheel, the home key, and the end key, will also work as expected.

If you find the text difficult to read, please enjoy as much of the image as you please, then click here.

Progressive Retreat was a collection of 75 books, one published in each year that Dartington Library's collection has existed (1935-2010). It was installed in the glass display cabinets on the library's ground floor, near to the entrance.

It was, amongst other things, an attempt to comprehend the life of the library. What it has seen, what functions it has performed, who has been a part of it, and what it remembers.

It was intimately involved with Dartington longer than any student, lecturer, or Elmhirst. It remembered more than anyone, and contained traces and whispers of the uncountable people who were a part of its life.

Progressive Retreat hoped to make some of this accessible, as the library neared its end.

(Adapted from companion booklet)

I searched library's online catalogue for all books published or printed in a given year. From this list, I shortlisted three or so books which conformed to the following:

• A quality of being tied to its era. Books which would seem absurd or anachronistic if published at any other time, i.e. Their Finest Hour.
• Books that represent trends in the collection at that time, such as feminist books from the 70's onwards.
• Books that otherwise seemed appropriate. I.e. Closure: A Story of Everything for 2001.

I then located these books on the shelves, verified their year, and picked the most appropriate, according to the same above conditions (also taking into account markings in the books, such as ex libris.)

"In 1930 Robert Musil imagined a devoted librarian who, working in Vienna's Imperial Library, knows every single title in that gigantic assembly. 'Do you want to know how I've been able to familiarise myself with every one of these books?' he asks an astonished visitor. 'Nothing prevents me from telling you: it is because I read none of them!' And he adds, 'The secret of every good librarian is never to read anything of all the literature with which he is entrusted, except the titles and the tables of contents. He who puts his nose inside the book itself is lost to the library! . . . Never will he be able to possess a view of the whole!' Hearing these words, Musil tells us, the visitor wants to do one of two things — either burst into tears or light a cigarette — but he knows that within the library walls both are denied him."

Manguel, A., 2008. The Library at Night, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, pp.254.

"In 1933, following the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of the Reich, the Warburg library and staff emigrated to England. Six hundred boxes of books plus furniture and equipment were shipped across the sea to London. I like to imagine the many barges crossing the water, laden with the volumes assembled over the years, a fragmented portrait of their owner — a reader now dead, but present in this dismantled representation of his library about to be reshaped in a foreign land."

"...an attempt was made, based on original photographs, to reproduce the shelving and the display of part of his collection, so that anyone who visits the house and stands for a moment in the reading room can feel as if Warburg's mind is still at work among his memorable and changing shelves."

Manguel, A., 2008. The Library at Night, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, pp.211-212.

Along with the installation was a freely-given booklet, explaining the intentions of the exhibition and expositing some on the position of the library. It also contained a list of every book in the exhibition, in red, which spilled across the front cover and title.

It is hoped that these booklets will scatter across personal collections and messy rooms, many possibly to Falmouth, and be rediscovered after (maybe many years after) the library has been dismantled.

A paginated PDF version of the booklet can be found here.

"After the Nazis began their looting and destruction of the Jewish libraries, the librarian in charge of the Sholem Aleichem Library in Biala Podlaska decided to save the books by carting away, day after day, as many as he and a colleague could manage, even though he believed that very soon 'there would be no readers left.' After two weeks the holdings had been moved to a secret attic, where they were discovered by the historian Tuvia Borzykowski long after the war ended. Writing about the librarian's action, Borzykowski remarked that it was carried out 'without any consideration as to whether anyone would ever need the saved books': it was an act of rescuing memory per se. The universe, the ancient cabbalists believed, is not contingent on our reading it; only on the possibility of our reading it."

Manguel, A., 2008. The Library at Night, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, p.237.

It felt quite important that the installation not compromise the current existence of the library. The shelves should act as any other shelves in the library: one must be able to take down and read, even take out, whichever books they please.

I signified this in a notice on the installation ('Please feel free to read the books', hopefully pointing to the absurdity of its own necessity). However, this meant that I could not 'trust' the books to remain where I had put them. I had to maintain the collection myself.

This gave me my own 'librarianship' post, in my own library-within-a-library.

And like any other Dartington Librarian of the current time, I had to deal with the gradual disintegration of the library before my eyes, as the contents were relocated to the UCF libraries.

At various points throughout my scouring of the library, this became apparent. Between 1935 and the 50's or so, there were a lot of play scripts. But English Literature was then being moved to Falmouth, so a lot of the books I sought were missing in action.

Similarly, Progressive Retreat interfered with the process of marking the books for Falmouth or Woodlane library. It was only in the later decades of my collection that some of the books were already marked such (with the obvious implications this brings for the piece). It is likely that the books in Progressive Retreat were amongst the last to be marked Tremough, Woodlane, or otherwise.

Progressive Retreat remained installed as the library attenuated around it. Save perhaps for various small holes punched in it, the books were likely some of the last to be transported down to Falmouth.

On May 21st, a book was donated to the library that dated the collection to 1930, rather than 1935, meaning the library is 80 years old, rather than 75. This book, Saint Joan, can be found at the far-left of the top shelf [the leftmost edge of this page]. It is stamped, signed and dated, by the first ever Dartington Librarian.

If you have any comments to make, feedback to give, or experiences to share, please do so by clicking here.

To the folk of Dartington Library, including the temporary moving staff, for putting up with my intrusions, and especially to John Sanford for his historical library knowledge (and for finding Saint Joan).

To the many nameless outsourced workers who typed up the Dartington library cards in the 90's, thereby computerising the catalogue and making my task possible.

To Maurice Punch, for writing the namesake of this project: Progressive Retreat: A Sociological Study of Dartington Hall School and Some of its Former Pupils.

1935: Music: the child and the masterpiece. ; 1936: The Modern Dowser ; 1937: Seven Famous One-Act Plays ; 1938: Family Album: A Victorian Comedy With Music ; 1939: Family Reunion ; 1940: Resolutions When I Come to be Old ; 1941: Their Finest Hour ; 1942: A Preface to Paradise Lost ; 1943: Education for a World Adrift ; 1944: British Timbers ; 1945: A Cockney on Main Street ; 1946: A Wall to Paint On ; 1947: Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind ; 1948: Windmills in England ; 1949: Death of a Salesman ; 1950: Dartmouth: A History of Port and Town ; 1951: Two cheers for Democracy ; 1952: Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections ; 1953: The Lost Tradition in Music ; 1954: Photography: Theory and Practice ; 1955: Spoken Word: A Selection from Twenty-Five Years ; 1956: Nude: A Study of Ideal Art ; 1957: Radiation: What it is and How it Affects You ; 1958: Art by Subtraction ; 1959: Recorder technique ; 1960: A Guide to Popular Music ; 1961: Imagination ; 1962: Male and female: A Study of the Sexes ; 1963: Children of the a-bomb ; 1964: The Excitement of Writing ; 1965: Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology ; 1966: The English Spirit ; 1967: The Arts in a Rural Society ; 1968: Plays from Black Africa ; 1969: Why are we in Vietnam ; 1970: Why Prison? ; 1971: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things ; 1972: Can Britain Survive ; 1973: Idea Art ; 1974: Adventures of a Bear Called Paddington ; 1975: Art Since Pop ; 1976: When God was a Woman ; 1977: Women's Rights ; 1978: Ring out! A book of bells ; 1979: Dartmoor, Exeter, Newton Abbot ; 1980: Introduction to Computer Music ; 1981: Working with Braille ; 1982: Advertising in Britain: A History ; 1983: Messages from the Falklands ; 1984: Get the message? A Decade of Arts for Social Change ; 1985: Book of the fallacy ; 1986: E-myth: Why Most Businesses Don't Work ; 1987: French Feminist Thought ; 1988: Outside the Mainstream ; 1989: Woman, Native, Other ; 1990: Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution ; 1991: Helene Cixous: A Politics of Writing ; 1992: Of Bridles and Burnings ; 1993: Holythroat Symposium ; 1994: Gender Outlaw ; 1995: Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis ; 1996: Arts and the Internet ; 1997: K Foundation Burn a Million Quid ; 1998: Table Leaked its Object ; 1999: How We Became Posthuman ; 2000: The Truth About Lying ; 2001: Closure: A Story of Everything ; 2002: West and the Rest ; 2003: Solitary Sex ; 2004: Research for Europe ; 2005: Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government... ; 2006: Short History of Progress ; 2007: A Treatise of Civil Power ; 2008: I Shot a Man in Reno ; 2009: Five Rooms ; 2010: Facing the Music