In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called "Unpacking My Library." As the title suggests, it’s a meditation on books, but it’s not about books as works of literature or as pieces of writing. Instead it's about books as material objects, physical things with intricate histories based on where they’ve been, histories which, so he argues, are intertwined with personal narratives, narratives of lives lived in search of volumes of volumes. In the essay…