The Library: A Fragile History

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The Nazis weren't the last to burn books and authors, their publishers and translators are still at mortal risk (as can be seen by Salman Rushdie's story that claimed several lives already). Not to mention the new rise of censorship, even or especially in 1st-world-countries that really should know better. If you want to know why New York was comparatively late in building a public library network, Tom Glynn’s magisterial study of the library culture of New York before the building of the NYPL is the book to read. A meticulous and profound introduction to a city filled with readers as it was transformed into a diverse economic powerhouse in the nineteenth century. There was one story I really wanted to hear about in this but which was unfortunately left out: that of Jella Lepman, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930 but returned at the end of WW2 to provide children with education and books. She's the founder of the Children's Library in Munich. While others dropped medical and food supplies from planes, she arranged for the same to be done with books, saying that stories are just as vital (which I agree with). To this day, the Children's Library at Munich is one of the best in my opinion with a great creation story to boot.

Beginning with libraries of cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia and ending up in today’s world of e-readers and Google Books, Pettegree and der Weduwen provide a detailed, vivid account of the history of the library. Although The Library begins in pre-Christian history (with vast collections of clay tablets in the ancient Near East, the famous library in Alexandria, and so on), and has occasional glances toward the great libraries of the Islamic world and of East Asia, it’s for the most part a history of libraries in the West—where the profound cultural transformation brought about by Christianity also extended to book and library culture. Building and Destroying Libraries The educated and affluent part of our community takes it for granted that public funding of the arts and the facilitation of recreational reading is part of the core functions of government. But the public library – in the sense of a funded collection available free to anyone who wants to use it – has only existed since the mid nineteenth century, a mere fraction of the history of the library as a whole. If there is one lesson from the centuries-long story of the library, it is that libraries only last as long as people find them useful.”

Church Times/Sarum College:

Early university students needed textbooks, which sometimes they expected to be reference books which would last them throughout their chosen careers. While the rich could buy beautiful manuscripts if they wished, not everyone could afford them. The solution? The standard works could be hired from a stationer, so the student could write out their own copy, before returning it and hiring the next instalment. Most of all , by empowering the digital revolution, librarians have given up the one unique selling point which they defended so tenaciously for almost as long as we have had libraries: the right to apply their knowledge, taste and discrimination to assisting the choice of their patrons. This has been the key to understanding so much in this book: the idea that in an age of plenty there will always be helpmates to assist readers in making the right choice of book. Can the internet, in all its enormous variety, ever replace this reflective process of deliberation, the slow choosing the eager anticipation, the slow unfolding of plot?" (and while impressive algorithms have made it easy to find "more of the same" - "What if we want something different, rather than more of the same? What if we do not know that we want something different, but a chance encounter sparks our interests?") What I might have enjoyed more would have been if the authors had mentioned truly modern forms of the book. It seemed as if the authors weren't too impressed or in favour of ebooks and audiobooks weren't mentioned at all despite their influence on both literature and libraries. Pity. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

This was such an amazing and thorough recounting of the make up and scope of libraries from ancient times until now. I was impressed with the amount of detail and research that went into this and the writing was far from dry as it wove through time and scope. Clearly, the history of Christianity is one of bibliophilia, although that love does not extend to all books in the same way. The key word in Pettegree and Weduwen’s subtitle is “fragile”. As they demonstrate, libraries have, since time immemorial, been subject to forces outwith their custodians’ control and have often been the hapless victims of war, fire, flood, pestilence, theft, neglect, the vagaries of inheritance and the invasiveness of nature, ignorance and prejudice. In other words, libraries need to adapt to survive, as they have always adapted to survive, a feat very successfully accomplished in recent years in France, with its network of Médiathèques, albeit with a huge commitment of public funds. University libraries, responding to student demand, are now social hubs as much as places of work, the cathedral silence that once characterized the library a thing of the past." Arthur der Weduwen is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the University Short Title Catalogue. He researches and writes on the history of the Dutch Republic, books, news, libraries and early modern politics. He is the author of Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (coauthored with Andrew Pettegree) and two books on early newspaper advertising in the Netherlands.Perfect for book lovers, this is a fascinating exploration of the history of libraries and the people who built them, from the ancient world to the digital age. I enjoyed that level of detail very much. From ancient to medieval times, the thirst for knowledge, and the need to record it was the springboard to what followed. From the creation of personal libraries sprang, many years later, the notion of public libraries. Nothing was considered too small or insignificant. And those details were covered all the way to modern times, including discussion on the current genres of the day and their significance. What utterly intrigued me was the way that exactly what a library is FOR has changed over the centuries. I am a huge fan of the public library, and absolutely uphold its place as a community resource. I do know that in medieval Europe, libraries were the province of monasteries and nobles - not least because that reflects the literacy of the age, and also the aspirations of such people. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.