Category Archives: AIDS Books

The ICI Library has a shelf dedicated to books on or about AIDS. Some titles are iconic such as Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors or Doug Crimp’s Melancholia and Moralism; others are by individuals who turned their HIV+ diagnosis into powerful statements about art and society such as David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives. Sadly, the effects of HIV and AIDS extends to many other shelves in the ICI Library in the grim statistic of loss. So many, too many, of the artist monographs in our collection catalog the work of artists who died of AIDS: Felix Gonzalez Torres, Paul Thek, Robert Mapplethorpe. On our ‘fiction’ shelf there are books by Bruce Chatwin, Herve Guibert, Isaac Asimov, writers of such diverging interests, all victims of AIDS. These books are not relegated to a single shelf but remain sprinkled through our other documents of culture in an attempt to remember each author’s contribution to society and not just their loss to us, even though their absence is always palpable in a library whose main focus is the arts. In a small cubby, as yet untitled, a slight book by Derek Jarman captures this sentiment in its final refrain: “I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.”