The Library: A Fragile History
by Andrew Pettegreee and Arthur Der Weduwen
(New York: Basic Books, 2021)
No society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations. What we will frequently see in this book is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artefacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows.
Page 2.
The public library - in the sense of a funded collection available free to anyone who wants to use it - has only existed since the id nineteenth century, a mere fraction of the history of the library s a whole. If there is one lesson form the centuries-long story of the library, it is that libraries only last as long as people find them useful.
Page 3.
Libraries need to adapt to survive.
Page 3.
University libraries, responding to student demand, are now social hubs as much as places of work, the cathedral silence that once characterised the library a thing of the past. In this, libraries actually hard back to an earlier model, pioneered in the Renaissance, when libraries were often convivial social spaces, in which books jostled for attention alongside paintings, sculptures, coins and curiosities.
Page 3.
A repeating cycle of creation and dispersal, decay and reconstruction, turns out to be the historical norm.
Page 3.
Very often libraries flourished in the hands of their first owner, and then wasted away: damp, dust, moths and bookworms do far more damage over the years than the targeted destruction of libraries.
Page 3.
What makes a library is, to a great extent, something each generation must decide anew.
Page 4.
The most substantial legacy of Rome, none of whose libraries survived the fall of the western empire, was the gradual transition from papyrus scrolls to parchment books as the medium of storage.
Page 5.
In Persia, India and China the collecting of fine manuscripts, embellished with elegant decorations, lavish colours and superb calligraphy, was a favoured pastime of princes and emperors
Page 5.
Gutenberg’s printed books dazzled the first generation of readers with their technological intricacy, but it still proved difficult to persuade established collectors that drab black-and-white texts were an adequate substitute for their beautifully illuminated manuscripts.
Page 5.
Made from cloth rags, paper was a far cheaper medium than parchment, and exquisitely well suited for partnership with the printing press.
Page 6.
This growth of book ownership was driven forward by a steady growth in literacy.
Page 6.
The desire to accumulate knowledge competed with the desire two control access to it, or use it so somehow ‘improve’ its readers.
Page 7.
With each century, new readers were brought into the compass of book ownership, and the same battles were repeatedly replayed, making out the library as a political space. Should readers in the new nineteenth-century public libraries have the books that they desired, or books that would make them better, more cultured people?
Page 7.
Hardly any institutional library before the nineteenth century had a budget for the acquisition of new books, so donations were essential for growth.
Page 8.
The history of the library is not a story of relentless progress. During the two centuries after the invention of printing, most institutional collections went into decline.
Page 8.
It was not unusual for professors to accumulate personal libraries three or four times the size of the university collection.
Page 8.
Libraries remain vulnerable for their cultural capital.
Page 9.
By the early twentieth century, western societies were approaching universal literacy for both men and women. This permitted a parallel impetus towards a radical idea: a network of public libraries, free to all, catering to the reading needs of the broad mass of the population.
Page 10.
Neither Andrew Carnegie, whose fortune funded a swathe of civic libraries across America and the United Kingdom, nor the British Public Libraries Act made provision for the purchase of books. These decisions lay in the hands of the library committee, usually dominated by the same local worthies who had previously populated the more exclusive subscription libraries.
Page 11.
Nineteenth-century legislation for shorter working days helped boost the library movement.
Page 13.
Wars inevitably closed down other opportunities for recreation, leading to an increase in the demand for books, both from troops in the field and on the home front.
Page 13.
The death of the library has been predicted almost as often as the death of the book.
Page 13.
For much of their long history, libraries were primarily an intellectual resource and a financial asset. Only the very rich could afford to treat their libraries s shiny toys with which to impress their friends, passers-by and, more incidentally, posterity.
Page 14.
The numberless collections of books assembled in private homes did every bit as much to sustain a vibrant book culture as institutional libraries.
Page 14.
Part fable, part historical reality, the ancient library of Alexandria has been a powerful symbol of intellectual aspiration throughout the history of book collecting.
Page 18.
Cuneiform libraries were located in royal palaces or temples, and intended exclusively for the use of scholarly staff and royal owners. They were not open to the public.
Page 19.
The discovery of the papyrus plant, and its excellence as a writing medium, was an essential requirement for the translation of the emerging Greek culture from an oral to a written form.
Page 20.
The library of Alexandria was first and foremost a scholarly academy: the rapidly developing collection of texts was essentially their research archive.
Pages 20-21.
A feature of the Alexandrian library was the high quality of the scholars recruited as librarians.
Page 21.
The major disadvantage of papyrus, otherwise an excellent medium for information storage, is its susceptibility to damp. Even in a well-curated collection, texts need to be recopied after a generation or two. The sheer size of the Alexandrian library militated against its survival.
Page 22.
Statesmen, authors and philosophers all gathered great libraries, often in each of their several residences. But for all that, Rome boasted nothing that we would recognise as a public library.
Page 23.
Authors in Rome, form Cicero to Pliny, were almost by definition members of the elite, and the public they had in mind was composed of people like themselves.
Page 23.
By opening their collections to visitors, ambitious public figures could simultaneously consolidate their reputations as men of letters while building a personal following.
Page 24.
Copying was expensive, since a slave trained as a scribe was hard to find. One could buy a small library for the price of an enslaved scribe capable of writing both Greek and Latin.
Page 25.
The ability to create bespoke texts from segments of other works, was one of the key features distinguishing the manuscript book world from the age of print, where the order and nature of texts was established before they came into the hands of the purchaser. This loss of autonomy in the creation of books would be one of the major sources of regret among established collectors in to print in the transition from manuscript to print in the fifteenth century.
Page 26.
With papyrus, one did not have the luxury of the age of paper or parchment, of allowing books to slumber unread on the shelves for centuries without the need for further curation.
Page 27.
The Christian Church, initially reviled, but ultimately the salvation of Roman culture.
Page 28.
In the centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, book production and book collecting took place largely within the domain of monastic communities, established throughout Europe by missionaries.
Page 31.
Many monasteries also played an important role in salvaging the remains of Roman culture by copying manuscripts containing the works of classical authors; indeed, this is how virtually all classical tests have come down to us today.
Page 31.
As the safe harbours of books, monasteries were also responsible for the survival of the library.
Page 31.
The virtues instilled in monastic communities required a steadfast devotion, even in the face of the greatest adversity.
Page 31.
As pagan temples crumbled throughout the twilight days of the Roman Empire, so Christian churches and convents replaced them. In this process the young zealots of the Christian Church trampled underfoot many books, as Roman temples also functioned as libraries.
Page 32.
The copying of scripture, old and new, was undertaken by believers throughout the Roman Empire, as essential tools for preaching.
Page 32.
Making copies of revered texts was also an act of prayer: as believers sought to live by scripture, they internalised the holy books through a form of meditation achieved through a constant recitation of the texts.
Page 32.
Although libraries were not mentioned int eh Rule, the emphasis placed on individual reading ensured that western monasteries were active producers and collectors of books.
Page 33.
Although Benedict’s Rule never mentions writing, it implicitly encouraged the copying of books as a virtuous and valuable activity, for the monks required many books.
Pages 33-34.
The monasteries had to follow the model of classical education, since there was no plausible alternative. Abbots, scholars and monks might be distrustful of the polytheistic religion, loose morals and flowery oratory of the classical authors, but they required the Roman rhetoricians, philosophers and historians to teach their brothers to read and write.
Page 34.
The debate on the copying and collecting of pagan literature unrolled in tandem with another crucial development of the period between the third and sixth centuries AD. The transition from the papyrus scroll, the preferred medium of ancient writing, to the parchment codex, with separate pages sewn together (a book), would transform the library. Parchment was not a new invention.
Page 34.
It seems that the fall of the Roman Empire disrupted significantly the supply of papyrus throughout the Mediterranean world; parchment became the standard replacement. As the material of the book changed, so did the form.
Page 35.
At some time in the third century, codices began to replace scrolls as the normative way to preserve a body of text: it was clear that this transformation was tied up with the Christian movement, whose early texts were almost universally produced as codices.
Page 35.
A parchment codex could carry the entire text of the Old and New Testament, whereas a scroll would usually hold only a single book from the Bible.
Page 35.
For the millennium after the collapse of the Roman Empire, books were mostly laid on tables, or stored in chests.
Page 36.
The period between the sixth and the eight centuries was the great age of the palimpsest: a parchment manuscript where the original text had been scraped or washed off, in order to free up valuable writing material. The obliteration of classical texts was not necessarily n act of hostility to the august literature of Rome: many more Christian than pagan texts were destroyed in this manner.
Page 36.
Most monasteries developed out of little more than what the monks themselves could build and cultivate.
Page 36.
Literary production may have been revered as a pious activity, but in practice it was a task that could, in the first years of the monastery, be reserved for the infirm.
Page 36.
Some monasteries, like Lindisfarne and Jarrow in England, Murbach in Alsace, Fulda in Hessen and St Gallen in Switzerland, would turn into important centres of book production.
Page 37.
Monasteries and convents became the favoured destination for surplus sons and daughters who might threaten the integrity of the family inheritance, and at the same time provided a means to extend a family’s influence within the growing ecclesiastical power structure.
Page 38.
The Christian Church was the common denominator in Charlemagne’s empire, and Latin was the only tongue that could unite it.
Page 38.
Efficient governance also relied on effective communication; in Charlemagne’s vast empire, communication became increasingly written, which prompted demand for a standardised language.
Page 38.
The average monastic book was a functional object, destined for intensive use.
Page 39.
The organisation of monasteries and nunneries into separate orders, with houses spread out across the continent, provided a natural network for the circulation of texts. Indeed, the lending of books form one monastery to another was one of the principle means by which books could be acquired.
Page 40.
The importance of books for the monastic life was symbolised by the introduction of new term in the history of the book: the scriptorium or writing room.
Page 40.
Most of all, monasteries produced books to fulfil their needs: those of the community as a whole and those of individual members. This naturally circumscribed the size of many monastic libraries, and, together with the sheer cost of parchment, helps explain why few medieval monasteries had libraries larger than 500 or 600 volumes.
Page 41.
Before the thirteenth century, the norm for most monastic libraries was probably not much larger than around 100 or 200 books.
Page 41.
The destruction of a library might take a day, but its replacement and slow recovery would occupy the better part of a century.
Page 42.
In many monasteries, a separate library room never came into being.
Page 42.
The reality of monastic book collections was that they were spread out throughout the complex, depending on the function of the books.
Page 42.
From the twelfth century onwards, the monasteries gradually lost their hegemony over the production, circulation ad collecting of books. A serious challenge emerged form new institutions: cathedral chapters, schools and universities, established in the expanding towns of Italy, France, Germany and England.
Page 44.
The accumulation of wealth in the monasteries came under criticism form within the church itself, leading to the foundation of new mendicant orders dedicated to the original vision of monastic poverty.
Page 44.
By the fourteenth century, the gest university libraries were outclassing those of the monasteries.
Page 45.
Books were now displayed openly rather than safely locked away in chests or cabinets.
Page 46.
As libraries grew in size and complexity, many institutions avoided chaining their books, and private owners seldom contemplated such a grandiose form of security. Still, the chained library proved remarkably ending in cathedral, church and college collections.
Page 46.
As money flowed into the cities, many monastic orders followed; by the fifteenth century, there would be more urban than rural monastic houses.
Page 47.
It was on the Italian peninsula that the book collections of the monasteries were devastated first, for here the monks had to contend with the emergence of a rapacious new breed of book collector.
Page 48.
Humanism was first and foremost a literary activity, based on the study and imitation of classical literature.
Page 48.
The collation of manuscripts in the search for the most authentic and complete copy of an individual work was the lifeblood of the humanist scholar.
Page 48.
A student away from home with money in their pocket is a recipe for parental anxiety, something as true in the thirteenth century as it is today.
Page 52.
A young student of theology or law was expected to own books - either those he copied out himself, or those bought from stationers associated with the university. … That students could aspire to small book collections of this sort was one consequence of the gradual industrialisation of book production.
Page 52.
The invention of printing did not create this demand; instead, the market was fuelled by universities and schools, movements of popular lay devotion and the steady growth of cities, where a bourgeois class emerged as a significant economic and political force to challenge that of the nobility and the church.
Page 53.
Books became ubiquitous objects in noble households, as emblems of piety, gifts to be exchanged with other households or texts for communal reading.
Page 54.
Serious collectors were soon building the first great secular libraries in Europe since the fall of Rome, rivalling monastic collections in size and importance.
Page 54.
As these institutions developed into important training centres for Europe’s emerging professional class, they attracted a new type of artisan, the stationer, who made his business selling parchment, pens, inks and books.
Page 54.
The growth of courts as administrative centres stimulated literary activity: administration required literacy and penmanship, and it is no surprise that many of the secular histories, romances and poems produced during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries came form the pens of secretaries and officials attached to courts in France Burgundy or England.
Page 56.
Creating a courtly library was a public act; not necessarily because the books were on permanent display or for public use, but because the acts involved in creating books, composition, copying, illumination and presentation, all took place under the patronage of the ruler and their family.
Page 56.
Books were but one of the many sumptuous objects that graced courts, alongside paintings, silverware, robes, clasps, brooches and tapestries. It is not wonder that many books themselves were bejewelled on their covers, or bound in the richest velvet, to match the brilliant display of other objects admired at court.
Pahe 57.
The most lavish book owned by the noble classes was also one of the most ubiquitous: the Book of Hours, which originated in the expansion of lay devotion promoted by the Catholic Church since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.
Page 57.
Growing numbers of lay people aspired to the pursuit of a religious life without the repudiation of worldly possessions required by the monastic life. The Book of Hours provided a means to access some of the spiritual routines of the clergy, by assembling a selection of popular prayers, hymns and meditations arranged around the traditional hours of liturgical service in use in monasteries.
Page 57.
Spurred by the ownership and display of pious literature, it was often through women that many courts acquired a bookish atmosphere.
Page 58.
For the aspiring urban elite, who wished to imitate the book ownership of the high nobility, stationers developed new, mass-produced Books of Hours.
Page 60.
The impressive collections of books gathered by the princes of northern Europe were for public display, but not for public use.
Page 61.
Upon the death of a prince, his books were inherited by his successor, or distributed among his relatives.
Page 61.
The humanist movement revolved around books, and it established book ownership as a marker of cultural refinement.
Page 61.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was a rarity to have a separate space I one’s house dedicated to one’s personal use.
Page 61.
The emergence of private studies marked an important step in the developments of library space.
Page 62.
The owner’s intellect was stimulated not only by being surrounded by books, but other objects, including busts, vases, coins and a great variety of curiosities, especially antiquities.
Pages 62-63.
The culture of collecting and scholarship was inherently social. Collecting the best books required an extensive network of like-minded friends.
Page 63.
To satisfy the literary desires of the popes, cardinals, bishops, generals and statesmen who had begun to take a serious interest in book collecting, there emerged a new class of book dealers, the cartolai.
Pages 63-64.
The book market became most advanced in those cities where humanist abounded: Florence, Naples, Rome, Venice and Milan. These were not cities associated with the earliest universities of Italy, but great commercial and political centres.
Page 64.
Princes of the calibre of the dukes of Burgundy or Lorenzo the Magnificent built libraries because this was an endeavour that was befitting their status. Books were expensive and precious objects, and collecting a large number of books was an exclusive activity.
Page 69.
Those who engaged with books on a daily basis were relatively few in number, and mainly drawn from the class of court officials, clergymen, physicians and scholars. To a prince, curating a great book collection was a means to draw these individuals to one’s court and into one’s favour.
Page 69.
The great libraries of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe were similar to those found in other parts of the world. The emirs and sultans of Persia and the caliphs of Baghdad, Cairo and Cordoba all assembled collections of books, and surrounded themselves with great artists and scholars.
Page 69.
Calligraphy, illumination and painting ranked among the highest art forms in the Islamic world.
Page 69.
One of the most remarkable centres of book collecting was the city of Timbuktu, an important trading centre on the banks of the river Niger. Between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, this was renowned as the home of the most learned Islamic scholars, whose rulings on sacred law were held in high regard by communities spread across North Africa.
Page 70.
An unfortunate consequence of this erasure of Islamic libraries from the medieval era is that verifiable details on the scope of these collections are extremely hard to uncover. Figures cited in later accounts offer estimates of hundreds of thousands or even millions of books, reminiscent of the panegyric heaped upon the holdings of the ancient library of Alexandria.
Page 70.
Chinese and later Arab society contributed a crucial innovation to the development of the library with the art of making paper.
Page 70.
The manufacture of paper was far cheaper and more efficient than the production of parchment form animal skins.
Page 71.
The impact of paper on book production would only become apparent in the fifteenth century.
Page 71.
There is indeed little evidence that the technology of moveable-type printing passed from China to Europe, and Johannes Gutenberg’s invention during the middle of the fifteenth century was certainly arrived at independently of developments elsewhere.
Page 72.
The creation of a mass market for books manufactured with the new technology of printing would bring the joys and tribulations of book ownership to a new generation of European collectors.
Page 72.
The production of manuscript books increased in volume for at least two decades after the invention of printing in the idle of the 1450s. The birth of print did not cause the collapse of manuscript culture; manuscript writings, in many forms, would continue to play a major part in the work of government, in the provision of news and in the literary world, for many centuries.
Page 75.
Ownership of a library no longer marked a man out as a member of the European social and political elite.
Page 76.
The survival of libraries was reliant once again on the monks and friars who had sustained the book world through the medieval era.
Page 76.
In the fifty years after Gutenberg printed his Bible, at least a thousand printers would at some point establish premises in one of 230 towns scattered around Europe. Many of them were active for only a few years; few found riches.
Page 76.
The invention of printing had coincided with a widespread movement of spiritual renewal, one that saw monasteries, rural and urban, eager to build or replenish their book collections. Printing seemed like a divine invention, bestowed upon the world at the time when it was needed most.
Pages 77-78.
The first printers were very careful to imitate manuscript books in shape, style and content. This was not a coincidence: some of the earliest printers had been scribes themselves, or were fully immersed in the manuscript book trade; but it also makes clear that the first printers were not trying to revolutionise the book world.
Page 78.
In the first years of printing, the scriptoria were kept busier than ever, the first books generally required finishing by hand, with the insertion of handwritten initials, red lettering and illumination.
Page 78.
The press was seen as a mechanical extension of the activities of a scribal workshop.
Pages 78.
The sheer quantity of new books in circulation certainly drove down prices by the 1490s. by 1500, 9 million copies of printed books had been turned off the press, and more were printed each year,
Page 81.
Prices had also been driven down because paper rather than parchment had now become the preferred medium of book production. This transformation was one borne of necessity, as the supply of parchment could never feed the insatiable demand of the presses.
Page 81.
The invention of printing saw the proliferation of paper-mills throughout Europe.
Page 81.
As debts and disappointments accumulated, printers huddled together for security in the largest mercantile cities of Europe, especially hose that had a pre-existing commercial book trade.
Page 82.
Paris would be the great centre of printing in northern Europe; in the south, Venice became the main print emporium.
Page 82.
In Italy, printing was identified as a German invention, largely practised in its early years by German immigrants.
Page 83.
Printing … served mostly a pious clientele.
Page 83.
Those buyers who bought a book for its text do not seem to have minded whether it came form a press or pen. In the first decades after the invention of printing, booksellers happily sold printed and handwritten books in the same shops.
Page 83.
There were few great collectors who actively disdained printed books. Nevertheless, the growth of printing did dim the appeal of library building for the ruling classes. Apart from their drop in vale, the fact that books were now so freely available also reduced the intimae bond between a connoisseur and the handwritten text acquired through a laboriously built network of personal connections.
Page 84.
Print was inherently inflexible compared to manuscript book production. It was the printer who decided how to arrange the book and lay out the text; with a manuscript, one could shape a test arranged according to one’s wishes, with excerpts from different authors, and a personalised illustrative scheme.
Page 84.
As more people amassed collections of books, the great libraries of the manuscript age lost their lustre.
Page 84.
As a young man, Henry VIII was well read, interesting himself greatly in Catholic and Protestant debates. To him, books were of practical use; they had little value as artefacts for display.
Page 87.
While the invention of printing heralded a new age for the library, filled with possibilities, it also condemned to obscurity and neglect the collections of an era left behind. It would take the best part of a hundred years before the comparative rarity of manuscript books would make them once more treasured objects of desire.
Page 87.
All great collectors are ruthless.
Page 88.
The future of collecting lay ever more clearly with the new world of print, its enormous abundance and the newly emboldened scholars working outside the institutional church. The impatient collector with money to burn could now build a quite astonishing collection in a remarkably short space of time.
Page 90.
Erasmus had shown that it was possible for a talented author to make money in the new industry of printed books, and could have made morel
Page 95.
Erasmus never owned a home of his own. To a man used to travelling light, books were a further burden that presented major logistical difficulties when he moved on.
Page 95.
Erasmus never catalogued his books; the collection was small enough for him to remember where everything was to be found.
Page 97.
Vertical shelving seems to us so much the obvious, logical way to store books, that it is hard to see why it took so long for this to become standard practice. The libraries of the Renaissance had preferred inclined desks or tables where each book would be displayed separately, while many owners still stuck to the traditional chests. Few had enough wall space to accommodate shelving, and even those who accumulated several hundred books could trust to memory to find the required text in one of their chests.
Page 97.
Most books in the local language were destined for reading and disposal, rather than collection.
Page 99.
This … would be an everyday story of library history. One man’s passion project would be nothing but a burden t those to whom the responsibility of curation was passed on. At least in the age of print, no failure was ever final. Libraries abandoned or dispersed, burned down or looted, could be regenerated with astonishing speed.
Page 100.
Martin Luther’s impassioned protest against the papacy was accompanied by a torrent of print, stimulating an astonishing public interest in Luther’s bold repudiation of the church and transforming the book trade.
Page 102.
The former monk was a pioneer of the printing press: Luther appealed directly to a broad public by writing short pamphlets, in the vernacular German tongue, that addressed crucial issues of theology succinctly.
Page 102.
The Reformation gradually changed the nature of the book: it became cheaper, shorter and less scholarly. This transformation encouraged many people who were not habitual buyers of books to build their own collections.
Page 102.
The Reformation shattered the unity of western Christendom. Those loyal to Rome denounced Luther and his followers as heretics; Luther, meanwhile, gradually broadened his attack to encompass the whole institutional structure of the Catholic Church.
Page 103.
As European territories divided along confessional lines, in many parts of the continent the result was quite devastating; Europe’s libraries would feel the effects of the schism for the next two centuries.
Page 103.
As German princes, dukes and city-states abandoned the old religion they appropriated monastic houses and ecclesiastical property.
Page 106.
King Henry VIII was one of Martin Luther’s most prominent critics, and he was hailed by Catholic Christendom as a defender of the faith.
Page 108.
The dissolution of the monasteries instigated the largest transfer of land in England since the Norman Conquest of 1066.
Page 108.
In their quest to justify the emergence of the independent Church of England, Protestant scholars sought for evidence among the monastic manuscript collections of the Anglo-Saxon origins of an ancient national church, free from papal deviancy.
Page 110.
Universities across Europe underwent intense scrutiny during the upheavals of the Reformation because of their important role as educational institutions for the clergy.
Page 112.
This work of renewal took shape in the Council of Trent (1545-63), which in twenty years of deliberations laid down firm guidelines for the institutional future of Catholicism. This involved direct intervention in the book industry, permanently changing the European book market, and having lasting effects on the development of libraries across the continent.
Page 113.
Printing was a new trade, and in many places in Europe not subject to traditional guild regulations.
Page 114.
The uncompromising reaction of the papacy to the Reformation meant that libraries were devastated in unexpected ways. Jewish libraries were one victim of the repressive atmosphere of the second half of the sixteenth century. … The Jews were identified as an unorthodox presence int eh midst of Catholicism, and an easier target than the militant German Protestants beyond the Alps.
Page 118.
Jewish book dealers prudently abandoned Venice for safer locations most notably Amsterdam and Poland-Lithuania.
Page 118.
Institutional libraries were targeted by Protestants and Catholics alike, because both recognised the symbolic capital invested in them.
Page 119.
Locking up a library, reducing its contents to waste paper, or expurgating texts: these were the varied tools used to limit access to undesirable literature.
Page 120.
By 1550, one hundred years after the invention of printing, Europe was awash with books. Ore books had been created in the last hundred years than in the whole history of mankind to this point.
Page 123.
In some parts of Europe, France for instance, universities did not build significant collections until the nineteenth century.
Page 123.
The creation of libraries became an urban phenomenon: these new classes of book owners were largely city dwellers.
Page 124.
Storage and display in family homes required new and urgent architectural solutions. Nevertheless, between 1150 and 1750 a library became ubiquitous in the home of the urban professional. This was the library’s new sanctuary, and it would revolutionise the book world.
Page 124.
This was an age in which people worried incessantly about their health; most book owners, whatever their profession, owned at least a handful of medical books.
Page 125.
Auctions helped collectors build their libraries more quickly and with a clear conscience. Collectors are always greedy, sometimes unscrupulous and often selfish. Auctions not only provided huge new opportunities to buy, but also allowed collectors to salve their conscience with the thought that their heirs could easily realise the value of their books after their death.
Page 130.
Books were a necessary part of professional lives; they could also be seen as prudent pension planning.
Page 130.
This medieval practice of storing books in a chest proved surprisingly tenacious.
Page 135.
In households where books did not have to be consulted daily, solid wooden chests offered maximum protection for what were precious possessions; often they shared space int eh chests with important documents, account books and other valuables.
Page 135.
Collectors could choose between four strategies for the disposal of their books. First, and most expensive, they could establish their books as a public collection, with a sufficient endowment to provide suitable accommodation and maintenance.
More affordably, collectors could leave their books to an existing library.
The third and most obvious strategy was to leave the collection to one’s family or friends in the hope that they would cherish it. Often they did not.
Lastly, one could simply realise the value of the books, either during one’s lifetime or by leaving the task to a grieving widow or children.
Pages 139-140.
The essential problem was one that has not changed through the history of collecting, from Alexandria to the present: no one cares about a library collection as much as the person who has assembled it.
Page 140.
Fire, neglect, assault by pirates, ungrateful heirs, careless nephews: the transition of a library from working tool to intellectual monument was strewn with so many pitfalls that it is no wonder that few collections survived to memorialise a stratum of collecting that was, at the time, essential to the history of the library.
Page 141.
The fact that Bodley could raise the status of Oxford’s library so rapidly is also indicative of the poor conditions of university libraries throughout Europe. Most universities were founded without a library.
Page 144.
By around 1600, universities, new and old, began to acquire libraries.
Page144.
Changing university curricula and new model of thought were as great a threat to the access of a library as was destruction by fire or sword.
Page 144.
Libraries could not survive if one did not plan for their future, so that the initial enthusiasm did not die with its founder.
Page 145.
University libraries regularly struggled with the loss of books, often taken home by professors, sometimes by visitors.
Page 145.
Bodley was assembling a modern collection that drew heavily on the scholarly culture of humanism, but sober Protestant that he was, his vision of the library also owed a great deal to the medieval scriptorium. There was the silence, and the provision of individual work benches.
Page 147.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were close to a hundred universities in Europe.
Page 149.
Older universities, generally those founded before 1500, tended to have a collegiate structure. This was detrimental to the formation of a central library, for the simple reason that most colleges had a library of their own. For the most part these college libraries functioned as extensions of multiple personal libraries, and were prized community resources, available only to the scholars of the college.
Page 150.
The only way in which university libraries could grow sustainably was with an acquisition budget that allowed the latest works to be added to the collections.
Page 151.
University libraries were often housed in a lecture hall, a church, chapel, the university printing office, or, most discouragingly, an attic.
Page 153.
Most universities did not consider their libraries a necessary resource for their students: instead, universities seemed to think of the students only in terms of potential damage to the collection.
Page 153.
The professionalisation of librarianship in universities would not occur until deep into the nineteenth century.
Pages 154-155.
The greatest drag weight on the development of university libraries was, somewhat paradoxically, an overabundance of books available in the general market. If it was relatively easy for a professor to build a substantial personal library, then he had little need for a large university library.
Page 156.
Popular literature, almanacs, newspapers, school books and poetry - was the backbone of the printing industry, but most university librarians agreed with Bodley that such ephemeral works, generally printed in the local vernacular, had little place in an institutional collection.
Page 157.
While the local presses turned out ever more books, institutional collections turned up their noses at the opportunities afforded by a diverse range of titles available in the market.
Page 158.
Libraries have sometimes been sought out as deliberate targets: as symbols of a hated power, or repositories of a culture marked for eradication.
Page 161.
Far less attention has been paid to the role of libraries as agents of conflict. Libraries and their collections could play a critical role in incubating the ideologies that have set creed against creed, nation against nation, even neighbour against neighbour.
Page 161.
Libraries became intellectual castles and fortresses, and an encapsulation of the values of the settlers who had crossed the seas to seize and subdue.
Page 161.
As Europeans expanded their control over vast swathes of the globe, they often attempted to create microcosms of European society, erecting European-style buildings, wearing European clothes, importing European models of education.
Page 161.
Even those who had rejected European society, like the Pilgrim Fathers, clung to books and libraries as essential markers of their civilisation.
Page 162.
Libraries wee looted or dismantled to delegitimise the claims of the rival, and carried off as booty to decorate a different library int eh conqueror’s homeland.
Page 162.
When Christopher Columbus returned form his first voyage with tall tales and curiosities but little of the fabled wealth promised, his greatest achievement was to recast the voyage as a patriotic triumph.
Page 163.
If Spanish America was the domain of the Dominicans and Franciscans, Portuguese Brazil was the kingdom of the Jesuits. The result was an extraordinary efflorescence of book culture and libraries.
Page 166.
All Jesuit colleges were expected to have a library.
Page 166.
In 1620, when the Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Leiden, en route to Massachusetts, their rejection of the European world they had left behind was very partial. Books, in particular, were an essential accoutrement of the new life they had chose.
Page 167.
The Pilgrims brought with them an extraordinary quantity of books, stocks that were gradually replenished by relief ships and trading vessels over the following years.
Page 168.
In societies such as this, clinging to the edge, as they saw it, of the known world, books were valued for their totemic value as well as for their texts.
Page 168.
Throughout the first century of colonial America, the most important collections were those assembled by the leading preachers.
Page 169.
By the end of the seventeenth century, Harvard College could boast the largest library in North America. The collection grew steadily though entirely though donation, since the college, in common with almost all institutions of higher education before the modern era, did not allocate funds for the buying of books.
Page 170.
“A book is a tool in the service of God.”
Page 172.
Thanks to the ever-increasing rate of publishing throughout Europe, the destruction of a library was increasingly potent as a weapon, since library collections could be rebuilt so much more easily.
Page 176.
The people of Europe recognised books for the incendiary objects they were: beacons of faith or pollutants of the body politic.
Page 178.
The Reformation had proclaimed the instruction of the people as a central goal of the new evangelical movement.
Page 182.
Before the invention of printing, the local church library would have been the largest, if not the only, library in many European communities.
Pages 182-183.
The tradition of bequeathing books to the community increased with the invention of printing, as more and more citizens were able to amass substantial collections of books.
Page 183.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we find an increasing number of collectors leaving their libraries to the town, with the specific instruction to establish a municipal or public library,
Page 183.
The burden of carrying dutifully for someone else’s books was great enough, but to develop them as a public resource often proved an unsurmountable challenge.
Page 184.
In the first days of the Reformation, Martin Luther had made an eloquent call for the establishment of schools to educate German youth, and his message was heeded.
Page 185.
The municipal libraries of the Netherlands remained sources of civic pride, unused but admired.
Page 187.
It seems that many library builders prioritised their own desire - to leave a monumental presence in their community - over careful consideration of the future users of their bequest.
Collectors always find it difficult to conceive that what they have curated, at great expense and effort, may hold little value to others.
Page 191.
By 1700, there were parish, school and city libraries dotted all over Europe. Some were founded by individual donors, by groups of friends, or by the local authorities.
Page 192.
The key to success for the public library, as many library founders failed to realise, was to make available books that users truly wanted to read.
Page 195.
Richelieu was the most successful figure of a new generation of statesmen, the great ministers, who, throughout Europe, were responsible for a rapid expansion of the power of the state and the instruments of government.
Page 199.
The great ministers could be nobles by birth, but they generally assumed their position thanks to their juridical or clerical training. Their weapon was the pen, rarely the sword.
Page 199.
To fulfil their duties, great ministers had increasing need for large reference collections of working papers, law books and ordinances. Richelieu also required scholars, erudite men who could trawl through books for legal precedents, correspond with librarians abroad and acquire new volumes for their patron’s use. Out of these dynamic working collections developed ever larger libraries.
Page 199.
Hushed insults and tavern rumours had to be taken seriously by the great ministers, for their hold on power was always precarious.
Page 200.
Emulation was made possible because great collectors were eager to show off their libraries to visitors; on diplomatic missions and on the grand tour, famous libraries became an essential destination for cultured envoys, bishops and young noblemen, keen to make their impression upon the world.
Page 209.
In an age of imitation, secrecy could be a powerful tool.
Page 214.
In the age of the great cardinal collectors, libraries had grown to enormous size; this was inevitable fi they were to stand out form the book collections of professional men who themselves often owned thousand of books. The creation of so many libraries, in castles, palaces and town houses all over Europe, also called for new design solutions.
Pages 214-215.
Before the seventeenth century, most libraries, great and small, had occupied spaces which were not originally constructed as rooms for books.
Page 215.
These aristocratic libraries were designed not only for the housing of large numbers of books, but as a social space, where one could receive visitors and conduct business, all the while impressing upon guests the host’s erudition and wealth.
Page 215.
The redesign of library space so that it resembled a church, a temple of wisdom, rather than a room for actual study.
Page 216.
Libraries throughout Europe abandoned the basic fittings of the medieval college and church libraries, dominated by reading lecterns and low central bookcases. Instead they remodelled library rooms to resemble great halls, in which books were laced, spines out, in great vertical bookcases along the walls.
Page 216.
In a lectern library, the books themselves were crucial to the visual attraction of the library: they were immediately in the eye of the beholder, ready to be opened, read and studied. In the baroque hall library, the books disappeared into the décor. It was only in their mass, their enormous volume, that they were impressive. The creation of a vast empty space in the centre of the hall emphasised the grandeur of the room, as the eyes could roam freely over a marbled floor, surrounded on all sides by rows upon rows of neatly bound volumes, decreasing in size as one moved from the floor to the domed ceiling.
Page 216.
The transformation of the libraries into lavish showrooms emphasised the continued role of the church in scholarship and erudition. It was also a means to justify the continuing power of the clergy, influence that was increasingly under fire during the course of the eighteenth century even in Catholic lands.
Page 217.
Visual decoration, in the form of frescoes, paintings and sculptures, was vital to the baroque monastic library.
Page 217.
The baroque library was a visual delight, but one that sacrificed study space for beauty, and relegated books to the same function as lavish wallpaper. The ordinary needs of readers - desks or lecterns for study - were sacrificed to accommodate marvellous objects that epitomised the wonders of inquiry.
Page 218.
By the eighteenth century, it was recognised that monarchs and sovereign princes could no longer be without a library. As the personification of the state, they were required to demonstrate a love for learning, education and enlightenment.
Page 220.
As books circled up the social hierarchy, multiplying along the way, a road was paved towards the foundation of the first national libraries.
Page 220.
Since the days of Gutenberg, the book trade had recognised one universal truth: books did not accrue additional value just because they were old. At best they kept their value, if the content was still relevant; at worst they could be sold for the value of the paper or parchment.
Page 222.
That anyone would begin to pay large sums for old books just because of their antiquity was a new development, and a disruptive one.
Page 222.
Scholars could make their name publishing new editions of classical texts based on close study of the best early manuscripts.
Page 225.
With the exceptions of the Bodleian Library and the University of Leiden, large institutional collections of manuscripts were still unusual in the seventeenth century.
Page 226.
The growing market for manuscripts, dominated by commercially minded scholars and librarians, paved the way for the formation of a volatile antiquarian market.
Page 229.
As the number of personal libraries grew, a collection of several hundred or even a thousand books was no longer anything to boast about.
Page 229.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, a canon of the most distinguished printers - Italian, French, German and Dutch - was largely established.
Page 230.
The fascination with topography advanced interesting eh early history of printing. This fitted neatly into the broader currents of antiquarian scholarship, the interest in ancient objects and physical remains as historical sources: in this context, early printed books were valued s sources for the study of history.
Page 231.
As interest in early printed books took hold, commercial agents took note.
Page 231.
Interest in incunabula and other rare books was eagerly stoked by booksellers, auctioneers and book agents.
Page 231.
Monastic communities were a prime target for the agendas of modernising governments, enthralled by the possibilities of social and economic reform inspired by the Enlightenment.
Page 233.
One of the supreme ambitions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was to liberate knowledge from the grip of the past. The new Enlightenment library was to consist of useful books, not those that reaffirmed traditional academic or ecclesiastical hierarchies. This placed the monastic libraries, at this point still the largest repositories of books in most Catholic lands, directly in the firing line.
Pages 233-234.
Revolutionary France also eagerly embraced an ideological mission to civilise other European states, something that would begin by making Paris the unrivalled cultural centre of the world.
Page 236.
Before the French Revolution, books had a spiritual and ethical value: as symbols of learning, of social distinction and of religious belief. The antiquarian craze of the eighteenth century had created a new form of historical capital, turning books into symbols of national prestige.
Page 238.
The seemingly mindless purchase of old books was deemed the very height of ostentatious consumerism.
Page 239.
The face of book production and circulation would change radically during the nineteenth century. Nostalgic sentimentality and a fascination with the origins of modernity saw many, especially libraries, engross themselves in the study of manuscripts and the earliest printed books. Incunabula became the most desirable targets for institutional libraries.
Page 240.
Both Europe and the United States experienced huge increases in population, along with a steady rise in rates of literacy. New methods of transportation brought isolated communities together, creating reading nations. Steam-powered presses made available a multitude of new reading materials: books, magazines and newspapers.
Page 245.
It was only with the arrival of the circulating libraries that the reading public could fully indulge their taste for the books they read for leisure. This preference was overwhelmingly for fiction: novels, detective stories and romance, with a few true-life travel adventures thrown in.
Page 246.
The subscription libraries, and their brash junior cousins the circulating libraries, gave customers for the first time real control over the books available to them, either because members of the subscription libraries chose them for themselves, or because the proprietors of the circulating libraries put economic considerations first, and gave their customers what they wanted.
Pages 246-247.
How far the public should be indulged in their pleasures, rather than be given what was good for them, was the subject of tortured debate throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Page 247.
From the nineteenth century onwards, the urgent need for curriculum modernisation, and the growth of scientific and technical education, eroded the traditional dominance of humanist learning.
Page 247.
With the rapid growth of subscription and circulating libraries, for the first time borrowing books became a plausible alternative to ownership.
Pages 247-248.
The link between book ownership and reading was weaker in the nineteenth century than it would be at any point before or since.
Page 248.
If we treat the ‘public library’ in the modern understanding of the term - a taxpayer-funded facility freely available to all local inhabitants, where books can be borrowed free of charge - then this concept made only halting progress until the very end of the nineteenth century.
Page 248.
In the nineteenth century, fiction for the new industrial masses became an industry in itself.
Pages 248-249.
To many, the main attraction of membership of social libraries was their provision of congenial space in which to read newspapers and meet other of the town’s leading citizens.
Page 250.
Book clubs generally consisted of between six and twelve friends, who met either in each other’s homes or in a local tavern. The books purchased with the subscription funds were disposed of at the end of the year: there was no intention to build a permanent collection.
Page 251.
Libraries in the major industrial cities attracted a large membership, allowing them to build considerable collections.
Page 253.
Subscription libraries brought a gloss of metropolitan sophistication to the established rhythms of agrarian life.
Page 254.
Women made up between 10 and 20 per cent of the membership of subscription libraries, and many more undoubtedly borrowed books through male relatives. In the eighteenth century, female readers were fast becoming a major force in the expanding book world.
Page 254.
Circulating libraries were routinely compared to brothels and gin shops. This moral panic was entirely due to their close association, in the public mind, with the circulation of fiction.
Page 259.
In general it can be said that the smaller the library and the smaller the community they served, the more absolute was their reliance on novels.
Page 260.
The golden age of the American circulating libraries would be the first half of the nineteenth century, when the capacities of the American publishing industry grew exponentially. This also provided a major new opportunity for American authors.
Page 263.
As journeys became longer and more frequent, there was growing demand for more substantial reading matter.
Page 266.
For those that carried them, books were a totem of civilisation as much as tools to plant European culture in their new homes.
Page 270.
For the enslavers, literacy was deemed to be a dangerous path towards subversion, and ultimately liberation. Enslaved people, though forma different perspective, also believed in the liberating power of books.
Page 271.
The nineteenth century, the great age of empire, was a critical era in the global development of the library. Attempts to export European culture overseas accelerated with the expansion of empire and the global migration of European people.
Page 271.
British troops in India were the first in the world to be provided with permanent libraries, some two decades before their colleagues in Britain received the same.
Page 273.
The shelves of military libraries were filled with fiction.
Page 274.
The library was a ubiquitous concept in rural Canada by the middle of the nineteenth century, but few libraries had staying power. In small communities, the survival of the local subscription library was often dependent on the energy of a few individuals.
Page 276.
In the great cities of the empire, the largest subscription libraries would later form the basis of public or national libraries.
Page 277.
It was the proper habit of a gentleman-collector to gather both books and a cabinet of curiosities.
Page 280.
Libraries had long been seen as symbols of cultural distinction, but that this concept could be tied directly to the nation state was a particular nineteenth-century development.
Page 280.
Most states could identify an old collection of books that had some claim to belonging to the nation, not least through the remnants of royal libraries. These collections provided a strong basis for national libraries, not necessarily because of their size but through the lustre of their former owners, and often the richness of their manuscript collections.
Page 281.
The rapacity of the Russian Empire was fuelled by a sense of cultural inferiority with western Europe, one that could only be repaired through aggressive collecting.
Page 282.
It was not enough to have a collection of books that belonged to the nation in name: it should reflect the cultural values of that nation, and most of all, collect and preserve its literature. A national library should aspire to be a universal collection of a nation’s books: those printed in the country, written by all authors of that nationality, written in the language of that nation, or dealing with its language and culture. Crucially, these were principles that resonated with the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century.
Page 283.
A national library should be universal in ambition as a repository, but selective when acquiring antiquarian volumes, because it was here that the reputation of a library was made.
Page 283.
National libraries were among the first institutional libraries to value works in the vernacular tongue over scholarly languages such as Latin and Greek.
Page 283.
The national library would actively pursue the accumulation of works in the vernacular; it would also, by necessity, accession newspapers and periodicals.
Page 283.
Legal deposit rights, although granted by many governments to their national libraries, in practice proved difficult to enforce.
Page 285.
As national libraries attracted donations and secured copyright deposits the quantity of books entering its stack grew unmanageable. … Chaos could only be avoided through rapid construction.
Page 285.
The symbolic association between the national and its library has ensured that the concept of a national library continues to be of some relevance. Yet its strong association with the nation, its people, culture and language, not to mention its prominent location in its capital city, also marks it out as a prime target.
Page 287.
The rapidity with which the United States could build the most expensive library building in the world, and its confident presentation of American destiny, was characteristic of the Gilded Age, the final decades of the nineteenth century. This was an era of unbridled growth, and the seemingly unlimited expansion of American wealth.
Page 288.
American industrialists and financial magnates wanted their homeland to equal if not surpass Europe in sophistication. Although the robber barons, as they were derided in the press, were frequently attacked for their greed, their patronage was of immense value in announcing America as a cultural leader of the world.
Page 288.
The First Folio is not a very rare book: over 200 copies are still in existence today.
Page 290.
Libraries proliferated during the nineteenth century, responding to the rapidly growing demand for books, a product of radical social ad technological change. Books became cheaper and more abundant, and ore men and women were looking to read, for recreation, information and social advancement.
Pages 295-296.
Philanthropy and civic pride would be the twin motors of library building in the United States.
Page 301.
In the eighteenth century, a library might be ‘public’ in much the same way as a public house (tavern) or public conveyance (bus, tram). Anyone could use it, but only on payment of a fee for the service offered. Other libraries provided services only for a defined membership, often united by a shared interest or profession. The Boston ideal, of libraries offered free to all citizens for the greater good of society as a whole, had to struggle against the engrained practice of a commercially minded society entering a golden age of prosperity and international influence.
Page 302.
When scholars and social reformers from Britain and the United States were seeking to promote the building of public libraries, they often looked for inspiration to France and Germany.
Page 307.
The transformation of the public library network in the United States and Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century demonstrated the difference that a powerful and clear-minded entrepreneur could make.
Page 310.
It is in small cities and towns across the American continent that s Carnegie library would have the most transforming impact on a community’s cultural life and self-respect.
Page 312.
A Carnegie library was a symbol of the community’s coming of age.
Page 313.
Almost since the invention of print, the campaign to turn reading into an instrument of moral purpose had concentrated its fire on fiction. … Almost every generation of library development had fought to exclude the pernicious instruments of light entertainment likely to turn heads and addle brains.
Page 315.
Belief in the adverse consequences of reading fiction remained powerful, even as novels became the absolute cornerstone of the publishing industry in the nineteenth century.
Page 316.
The trustees of subscription libraries justified the purchase of fiction as a means of inculcating the habit of reading, hoping that neophyte readers would then move on to more serious books. This optimistic prognosis was frequently repeated, even when all evidence was to the contrary.
Page 316.
By the 1890s, public libraries reported that between 65 and 90 per cent of books borrowed were works of fiction. This was too strong a tide to be ignored. Librarians switched their attention to directing patrons towards the right sort of fiction. Librarians recognised the difference between the trivial, which could be tolerated, and the ‘vicious.’
Page 317.
In the United States, librarians routinely kept the more controversial titles in the central library but declined to circulate them to the branches.
Page 318.
Providing fiction for the troops in the First World War demolished many taboos, and the post-war challenge of communism moved the spotlight on to non-fiction titles. The red menace, pornography and sexual licence seemed, in the twentieth century, to be much greater threats than the Sherlock Holmes novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Page 319.
It was only after the First World War that the library shed its nineteenth-century identity as an instrument of social reform, and tentatively embraced a new role, as much a part of the entertainment industry as it was a source of enlightenment, improvement and redemption.
Page 319.
As the twentieth century w ore on, it gradually became clear that fiction was in fact the main defence of libraries against obsolescence. Falling in love with fiction was the key to survival.
Page 319.
While the tide of war ran in Germany’s favour, directors of the major libraries were seconded to scour the libraries of conquered Europe for representative texts of German culture to be repatriated the libraries of the Reich. The cultural treasures of groups marked out for extinction were rooted out and obliterated.
Page 324.
Libraries were not only the victims of war, but were active participants in the conflict.
Page 325.
Libraries played a critical role in preparing the population for war and strengthening their resolve to fight.
Page 325.
Libraries were never just the innocent victims of war: they were themselves weaponised.
Page 326.
The ideologies of the thousand-year Reich had more ambitious plans for books and libraries, and these were pursued with an extraordinary tenacity until the very last days of the war. The first strand was the wholesale destruction of the entire written record of groups singled out for obliteration: this assault on culture, to wipe memory form the face of the earth, has been described as libricide, the genocide of books. Second, in paradoxical opposition to this policy, was the systematic collecting in Nazi Germany of huge collections of the books of enemy ideologies, so that even in the perennial rule of National Socialism, these evils - Bolshevism, Socialism, Judaism, Freemasonry - could be studied.
Page 334.
“Reading makes you into a human being. They wanted to destroy the Jews by robbing them of what was most important to them.”
Page 338.
Books and libraries were never more valued than during the second world War. Men on active service, far from home, often turned to books, and enormous logistical effort went into keeping them supplied.
Page 350.
Just as they had by penning cheap novels in the nineteenth century, journalists found it easier to apply their facility with words (and their experience of writing as a collective enterprise) to screenwriting.
Page 356.
The triumph of the movies was the most profound change in recreational culture in modern times, a democratic medium for all ages and all social classes.
Page 356.
Hollywood appears less of a threat to literature than a huge infusion of new capital.
Page 356.
Technology was empowering, but it also made those who could not afford a fried or new automobile acutely aware of their inferiority.
Page 357.
Libraries also flourished because rising prosperity prevented consumers from having to choose between their modes of entertainment. The library became one more generous amenity in a land of plenty, a reassuringly familiar presence in a whirlwind of the new.
Page 357.
The proliferation of magazines, aimed at all levels of the reading market, posed difficult choices for libraries, particularly as readers insisted equally on a well-stocked newspaper reading room. … For many patrons, newspapers ad periodicals were as important a draw as the book stock.
Pages 357-358.
Libraries functioned best when they offered readers what they could not easily buy for themselves; but the consumer revolution of the early twentieth century created a more affluent and better-educated readership who could well afford to purchase their own recreational reading matter.
Page 358.
Paperbacks posed yet another problem for public libraries, as they were smart enough to be collectable for the home library, but not sufficiently resilient for repeated reading.
Page 361.
Only with female readers were libraries successful in adjusting library provision to patron needs. Libraries struggled to understand the rapidly changing priorities of adolescents and what would later be called teenagers: the urge to offer children what was good for them remained strong. And the challenge to provide adequate library services to far-flung rural communities remained daunting.
Page 362.
For the United States extending library access to the rural hinterland was a task of almost religious importance.
Page 362.
The Depression was a good age generally for libraries, a place of solace in hard times, warm and dry and useful and free.
Page 365.
By the last third of the twentieth century, the mobile library had become a very visible symbol of the globalisation of library culture.
Page 368.
It was only in the twentieth century that the needs of young readers began to be systematically addressed by library professionals. Part of the problem was deciding what children were, and whether they should even be allowed. Nineteenth-century libraries concentrated most of their attention on young adults, principally young men embarking on the first steps of a profession or career in trade.
Page 368.
Noise, running in the stairs, grubby fingers damaging books: all posed a threat to the good order and decorum expected if the library was to function as an extension of the Victorian family. Some American libraries responded by placing the children’s room next to the entrance, so young readers would have no need to stray further into the building.
Page 369.
Legislation mandating compulsory primary education brought an ever higher proportion of the population of the major industrial nations into the schoolroom.
Page 369.
Libraries remained intimidating and unattractive to many children, too redolent of the schoolroom to be a first choice for valued leisure time. … For many children, the library was far more relevant to their parents’ aspirations than their own fast-changing world.
Page 370.
The first half of the twentieth century was particularly challenging for young adults, and those recognised, in the new psychology, ads adolescents. The First World War, the Depression ad the Second World War were all crises in which young adults bore the brunt of decisions taken by their elders.
Page 370.
The public libraries of Germany were so thoroughly Nazified that at war’s end half of the surviving stock was deemed unfit for the transition to democracy.
Page 371.
The public library movement was initially far more concerned with issues of class than gender, integrating the expanding working class into the civilising pleasures of reading.
Pages 373-374.
Romance has never attracted much admiration or attention form literary critics, yet in one respect it represents a remarkable triumph for female agency, pursued with the dogged devotion of the novels’ own plucky heroines, in the face of critical and official disdain.
Page 380.
To many, censorship was not a dirty word, but the defence of essential values relentlessly threatened by sedition bad literature and the weak curation of public library collections. Page 382.
The issue of segregation in the American South posed the greatest challenge to the American Library Association, and one it conspicuously failed to meet.
Page 387.
Even in highly controlled societies, reading is an individual activity. Reading offered escape from the pressures of the everyday, not least of crowded home living space. It also offered a means of establishing some sort of intellectual autonomy, in a life where every step of personal development was carefully monitored.
Page 389.
In the West, the library would cling to life through the storms of media change, while despite the best intentions of home governments, philanthropists and non-governmental organisations, the public library movement is yet to realise its full potential in the developing world.
Page 395.
There is no doubt that library strategists have a daunting task. They need to serve the current generation of users, while at the same time anticipating future need in an ever-changing media environment in which consumers habits constantly evolve.
Page 399.
Libraries need to move with the times, but too confident a step in the wrong direction can lead to calamity.
Page 399.
Despite their somewhat herbivorous reputation, many librarians are ambitious for their community, evangelical about education, and, at the top end of the profession, keen to leave a permanent legacy. Those who reach the top of the tree are also often agile politicians, comfortable in the company of elected officials, and aware of their susceptibility to grand plans.
Page 399.
For most of the era since the birth of the public library, French libraries had been a byword for dereliction and neglect.
Page 401.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina serves as a symbol of a worldwide commitment to the value of education as a means of empowerment, and the place of information at its heart.
Page 403.
The real problem, it is argued, it not the assault on the medium of the book, but the attack on our attention span.
Page 405.
A more potent criticism of the smartphone is that its addictive features are not an accidental by-product, but deliberately programmed to create dependence; a dependence that leaves little space for reflective reading.
Page 405.
Library fires are in fact not uncommon: there are 200 fires reported every year in libraries in the United States. Antiquated electrics are responsible for many of the most serious.
Page 406.
Until relatively recently we liked to think of libraries as sanctuaries: a place where books, once safely stowed, will be protected. As it turns out, this safe refuge is only provisional. Books leave libraries all the time: occasionally as a result of one of the catastrophic events that have captured our attention in this book, but also in the normal run of a librarian’s work. Books are removed because they are no longer read, and to make room for new accessions; worn copies are replaced. ‘Weeding’ is a core part of the librarian’s job, and undertaken with seriousness while applying careful protocols.
Page 406.
Space has to be found for banks of computers, meeting space, new media. Often removing books has been the only solution.
Page 407.
Going all-in on digital is not a choice without dangers for the library community. Libraries are in effect betting the store on a technology that will soon be so ubiquitous that libraries could become irrelevant to it. … For 500 years books have been central to the purpose of the library. Free Wi-Fi as the key to the library’s future is unlikely to last out this decade.
Page 409.
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.
Page 409.
The internet, it is true, is the perfect tool for an impatient age.
Page 409.
Libraries and books encourage reflective thought. We cannot delegate the whole burden of returning balance to our lives to classes and therapeutic groups. A book creates a mindfulness class of one.
Page 410.
The death of the book, predicted with great confidence with each new communication invention, just refuses to happen.
Page 410.
Books do not spoil, they are easily transported, the y come in relatively uniform sizes, and customers have a good idea of what they want. You could add, perhaps of less benefit to a tech entrepreneur looking for repeat sales, they are sturdy and resilient, they do not require servicing or replacement parts, and they provide cultural capital: either to be admired as an adornment of the home or office, or to be shared, loaned or cherished.
Page 411.
Anyone who wishes may join the community of book readers at any point in their lives, and they ay equally leave or suspend their membership (a characteristic libraries share with organised religion). Many people use libraries intensely for parts of their life - as college students or mothers with young children - and then possibly never again. They may start using the library for the first time when they retire.
Page 412.
It is the randomness of books, of taste and curiosity that ensures that libraries remain a place where a broad cross-section of society can drop in, wander, browses, and leave when they like.
Page 413.
Browsing is key to the success of the institutional library, and a key difference between this and personal collections.
Page 413.
To be the ideal customer for digital services, humans have themselves to become much more robotic, predictable, limited, docile.
Page 413.
The sheer tangibility of the book is a key element of its success, and its versatility: as manual, totem, encyclopedia and source of entertainment. And the library, as location and concept, has shared this mutability.
Page 414.