OSHO: “To me a book is not just a book; it is a love affair…”
I have loved reading from my very childhood. My own personal library consisted of one hundred fifty thousand rare books of all the religions, philosophies, poetry, literature. And I have read all of them, but with no purpose; I enjoyed it.” —
The OSHO Library is maintained by Osho International Foundation. —
All of these books have been read, signed and dated by Osho, except about 10,000 which have been gathered on his request after he stopped reading. —
Osho’s personal library is now housed in a building named “Lao Tzu House” at the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune, India. The library holds more than 150,000 volumes, mostly in the humanities, including history, psychology, religion and philosophy. It also features a quite substantial collection of the classic literature of East and West, along with an impressive array of biographies, books on physics and earth sciences, etc. The library has been created with aesthetic considerations in mind, the object being to create a light and airy feeling rather than the “heavy” and “serious” look of so many libraries. Books are sorted according to size and color, and placed on the shelves in an arrangement that suggests ocean waves. The effect is organic and natural, with no solid blocks of color or size to grab the eye and weigh it down. Osho himself was an avid book collector and reader
throughout most of his life, and the library includes volumes that he has kept in pristine condition since his childhood. He liked to underline his books, and to create an individualized painting on the front pages, often including his signature, in place of a printed book plate. Part of his work was to give daily extemporaneous talks, which he would sometimes punctuate with quotes and passages from books he had read. The library was catalogued by hand for many years, with cross-references that included not only title, author and subject matter, but such things as the cover color, number of pages and trim size. In that way, if Osho wanted to see that “big book on Einstein’s theory of relativity with the blue cover, ” the librarian could locate the needle in the haystack with relative ease. In 1987, a three-year project was initiated to computerize the card catalog. —
The UK library journal LOGOS has published an extensive article about the library written by: Pierre Evald, Department of Library & Information Management Royal School of Library and Information Science Langagervej 4 – DK- 220 Aalborg Ø Room: 418 T: + 45 98 15 79 22 + 45 98 15 79 22, E-mail: pe@db.dk —
This video is available for translation as part of the OSHO TALKS Video Translation Project. — Join the project as a translator at:http://www.oshotalks.info — OSHO International Foundation: http://www.osho.com
