Library and information studies (LIS) is still a relatively small academic field in Southeastern Europe. Graduate courses are taught in several public and private universities in the region, and there are a small number of information studies departments that offer all levels of higher education, such as that at the University of Zadar. As is true elsewhere in the world, there is more education in the field of libraries than of archives. Applied “archivistics” are present in pregraduate curricula, mostly within history departments, but this is primarily seen as an auxiliary tool, not as a fully-fledged academic discipline. Archival practice and librarianship are primarily taught through professional education, and only a relatively small number of professionals have a specialized academic education. This presents challenges for the operation of the archival and library fields in any generic setting, while in historically challenged and/or charged environments, such as anywhere in Southeastern Europe, such difficulties grow exponentially. Dora Komnenović’s book Reading Between the Lines is a testament to the uneven relationship between the library profession, which is fighting to outgrow its old ways through intellectual challenge and technological development, and the complexities of our sociopolitical context, which inevitably conditions all disciplines related to memory.

This book is, however, not written as a handbook for professional librarians, nor should it be read as such. It is an interdisciplinary analysis combining historical, sociological, and anthropological research with relevant data on libraries, resulting in a relevant cultural study. As the subtitle suggests, the author reflects on “discarded books” in the context of sociopolitical transformations in what was once Yugoslavia. Essentially, the starting point of her text is a perfectly normal, albeit relatively unknown, task of libraries: that of discarding books for various professionally defined reasons. This topic is then explored in the abnormal context of the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In other words, libraries normally acquire, preserve and lend out books, but they also deaccession them because of loss of relevance, physical damage, inappropriate content, or for other reasons, which are defined among other norms and regulations by the standards of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). While professional best practices are set up to ensure that no book is fully and permanently lost in this process as there is always an archived copy preserved, the “discarded” volumes are given away, sold, or turned into recycled paper. Komnenović explores the societal effect of discarding books in an environment where people died or were driven away, where polycentric languages continue to be torn into ethnicized and “purified” forms, and where dominant ideologies have been shifted from Marxian “giant leaps” to a dead stop proclaimed as the “end of history”. And—why not add it?—this is a justified area of research, answering questions which might well have been instinctively felt by anyone who has been an honest actor in a memory-related field. Have we not all seen texts, authors, ideas, and linguistic forms cast away, albeit in paper form, bound between covers? Were we not all moved by the sight of a discarded book?

Such instances did not remain within the closed realms of personal experiences; plenty were made public. Quite well known is a critical exposition written by Ante Lešaja titled Knjigocid (Libricide), published in Zagreb in 2012.^[1] Lešaja, a Marxist economist and university professor, was once involved with the “Korčula School” on his native Adriatic island. And it was precisely here that one of the more infamous cases of so-called “book burnings” happened, when in 1997 the local city library performed a hasty disposal of books marked as “outdated”. Inappropriately dumped in a waste container were classics like Leo Tolstoy, Émile Zola, Luigi Pirandello, but also Yugoslav authors such as Branko Ćopić, Branislav Nušić, Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, August Cesarec, Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, and Anđelka Martić, the last three of whom were even Croatian. Lešaja had previously helped develop this library, so the scandal was personal and propelled him to write his detailed study of the destruction of books in Croatia in the 1990s.

Komnenović builds upon studies such as Lešaja’s. Reading between the Lines takes a comparative look at Croatia and Slovenia, which both separated from their Yugoslav neighbours and eventually joined a trajectory towards the European Union. The elites of both newly minted countries constructed a self-distancing narrative vis-à-vis the common Yugoslav past. In Croatia, this was shaped by a long war. Importantly, the ideological battle in Croatia was also shaped by the fact that Croats, unlike the Slovenes, share an interlinked linguistic space with the Serbs and other former compatriots. This added another element to the politics of language, and, consequently, to the practices of publishing and library curation. Komnenović approaches these processes from the top down, starting with the geopolitical shifts, and moving through policy, memory politics, and language modifications. With a methodological segue, the author then takes her readers into “the theory and practice of weeding and discarding in public libraries” (116), followed by examples of practice. Her study is based on sources such as newspaper reports, studies such as Lešaja’s, official library data on weeding, as well as interviews with librarians, book merchants, and even someone from the paper processing business.

The central part of the book concludes with a comparison of Croatia and Slovenia. Komnenović presents several clusters of highly interesting and relevant data, especially on Croatia, which, according to her findings, did indeed go through a “cleansing” process that can only partially be explained with library standards. For example, in 1994, Croatian libraries disposed of some 10 % of their entire holdings, which is twice as much as the suggested annual deaccession norm. There can be no doubt: top-down instructions asked compulsory schools to reduce “ideologically tainted” literature and textbooks. The practice of disposal (not only in school libraries) affected volumes which were now deemed unwelcome: Serbian, especially texts in Cyrillic script, as well as Marxist and pro-Yugoslav literature.

None of this is surprising. In a way, there is always a crude mechanism involved: when volumes are no longer used or are considered unusable, libraries tend to weed them out. With relative success, Komnenović has superimposed the normal, mechanical process of library weeding and disposal upon infamous cases of book destruction. At the same time, she juxtaposes the meanings behind these processes. Whether they are intrinsic (found in the actors’ possible motives) or ascribed (in the eye of the beholder), these meanings all stem from the wider sociopolitical context. And since books have afterlives, Komnenović follows up on several cases where discarded volumes were born again, whether as library holdings or revived and reused as art. Reading between the Lines sets out to understand the role of libraries in broader culture-building mechanisms, and how these institutions’ motives, choices, and everyday practices shape wider narratives. She points to a much larger debate on the need for self-reflexivity within cultural professions, with their ongoing struggle to transcend the neutrality paradigm.