Library: An Unquiet History"Splendidly articulate, informative and provoking....A book to be savored and gone back to."—Baltimore Sun On the survival and destruction of knowledge, from Alexandria to the Internet. Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library, from socialist reading rooms and rural home libraries to the Information Age.He explores how libraries are built and how they are destroyed, from the decay of the great Alexandrian library to scroll burnings in ancient China to the destruction of Aztec books by the Spanish—and in our own time, the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia. Encyclopedic in its breadth and novelistic in its telling, this volume will occupy a treasured place on the bookshelf next to Baker's Double Fold, Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, Manguel's A History of Reading, and Winchester's The Professor and the Madman. |
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Alexandria American ancient András antiquity Arabic authority Aztec Aztec books Battles became Bentley book burnings Bosnian British Library British Museum building burned books caliph card catalog Cassiodorus century A.D. Christian classical collection College contained copy Cosimo culture destruction Dewey Dewey's early edited elite emperor empire Enoch Soames fire geniza German ghetto Greek hand Harvard House of Wisdom hundred intellectual Jewish John Dunton Jonathan Swift Kazin Kruk later Latin learning letters librarian Library of Alexandria library's literary literature Louvain manuscripts medieval modern National Nazi Nicolas nineteenth century number of books Panizzi papyrus patrons perhaps printed Ptolemies Public Library Qin dynasty readers reading rooms Reich Renaissance Riedlmayer Roman Rome Rome's Royal Library scholars scholarship scrolls shelves Shi Huangdi Sima Qian society stacks story survived Swift Swift's library Temple texts thousand tion translation universal library Vatican Library Vespasiano Vijećnica volumes Wotton writing written wrote