In almost all of her recent work, Ruth Buchanan has examined the physical spaces of language: books and the buildings that house them. In her book The weather, a building, 2012, for example, she traced the movement of Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek—from its original location on Unter den Linden; through wartime Germany, when its most valuable items were dispersed through the Reich; and to its final resting place on Potsdamer Straße in 1978. Buchanan used the library, and hence the book as such, as a cipher for the shunting of ideas and values through a city scarred by its complex relationship