Library : an unquiet history / Matthew Battles.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Battles, Matthew.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Libraries--History.

Libraries.

History.

Libraries and society--History.

Libraries and society.

Books--History.

Books.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

x, 245 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton, 2003.

Summary:

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 classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library, from socialist reading rooms and rural home libraries to the Information Age. From the clay-tablet collections of ancient Mesopotamia to the storied Alexandria libraries in Egypt, from the burned scrolls of China's Qing Dynasty to the book pyres of the Hitler Youth, from the great medieval library in Baghdad to the priceless volumes destroyed in the multicultural Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo, the library has been a battleground of competing notions of what books mean to us. Battles explores how, throughout its many changes, the library has served two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, the urge to exalt canons of literature, to secure and worship the best and most beautiful words; on the other, the desire to contain and control all forms of human knowledge. Encyclopedic in breadth and novelistic in its telling, Library is a slim history that speaks volumes.

Contents:

Reading the library

Burning Alexandria

The house of wisdom

The battle of the books

Books for all

Knowledge on fire

Lost in the stacks.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [215]-227) and index.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0393020290

OCLC:

51305782