Resistance need not wear a beret nor brandish a placard, chic and admirable though such options undoubtedly are. Declining the dramatic, it can also take more passive forms; a retreat, for instance, from the hectic hectoring of app-phetamine logic into the contemplative depths of the analogue.

Intentionally, or otherwise, Everything & Nothing, an exhibition at Manchester’s Portico to mark its 220^th anniversary, lives and breathes the latter. Conceived to kindle awareness of Portico Reunited – the library’s ambition to take back ownership of that part of the Grade II* listed building ceded to the pub downstairs – curator Apapat Jai-in Glynn has brought the artefacts of its past to the fore, even as it dreams of the future.

Beneath the all-seeing eye of the Portico‘s dome, and encased – for the most part – under glass, the memorabilia encompasses a broad reliquary of time absorbed by reading and the particular tactility of paper bound between hard covers. Naturally, there is a fine selection of makeshift bookmarks, improvised from receipts for shops which are no longer trading, or torn from cigarette packets whose brands have long since been discontinued.

Those who have haunted libraries in decades past will also be familiar with the pencilled marginalia of those taking the author to task. Here, Glynn and her team have mounted within their display cases the more exotic counterpart to such handwritten exegeses; the fully-formed doodle that serves as an unlooked-for illustration, an imprint through which the reader has made themselves part-author.

Apart from a photograph of one-time member William Gaskell with the yet-to-be-known Beatrix Potter as a child, the exhibition chooses not to doff its cap at the illustrious who have been members, but to recognise the contributions of folk who might otherwise have passed without comment; the keepers of the rooms, for instance, who in its earlier days furnished its chambers with the daily news, hot from the presses.

Completing the analogue assembly, there’s even that 70s staple of the informative evening, the slide show, clicking autonomously through a carousel of archive photographs, saturated with the colours of the film stock of the day.

In fact, perhaps the one concession to the insubstantial world made manifest through the voracious thirst of data centres is the lurking presence of a QR code, inviting the peruser to access further reading beyond the display, which supplements the otherwise substantive touchstones gathered from Charlotte Coull’s Material City project; collating the brick and the concrete from which Manchester has been sculpted, and the detritus with which its citizens have carelessly garlanded it.

It remains to be seen how close to the spirit of the current Portico its future aspirations to house an exhibition space and specifically Northern bookshop will cleave. Can it can be wired to the wider world, its QR codes and its interactive screens without becoming, in the words of Mark E. Smith, totally wired? To shun entirely the realities of the current century would be to court becoming a museum piece, a fetish object for a narrow niche of library devotees stirred to devotion by such details as its unique wind dial, yet to abandon itself entirely to the times would be to surrender something of its soul.

It’s a delicate balance to strike, between modernising the vision of original architect, Thomas Harrison, and graffitiing over it like a doodle in a textbook. Somewhere, in fact, between everything and nothing.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: credit Beth Castle and The Portico Library

 

Everything & Nothing is at the Portico until October 3, 2026. Entry is free. For more information, click here.