Thoughts on reading Matthew Battle's "LIbrary"

I have just finished reading Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battle. The author is a special collections librarian at Harvard, and has written a book that is part memoir, part "literature", and part historical account. Battle organizes his book chronologically, first discussing some examples of ancient libraries, moving to the monastic libraries of the middle ages, considering the development of university libraries, the libraries of the 19th century, and ultimately the modern library. In the process he considers the evolving role of the librarian, the cataloging of books, and even library architecture and library furnishing,

"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."
("That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.")
Heinrich Heine from his 1821 play Almansor

One of the themes of the book is the destruction of libraries and the burning of books. Sometimes, as (perhaps) in the burning of the library of Alexandria by Julius Caeser, libraries have been destroyed by accident. Sometimes, as (perhaps) in the shelling of the library of Louvain University by the German army in World War II, they have been destroyed by deliberate acts of anger. Whatever the cause, mankind has lost a huge cultural heritage due to the burning of books and the destruction of their depositories.

I enjoyed this short book for the stories it tells, and for the way they are told. I warn those who would read this book not to expect a formal historical text, but rather an anecdotal set of accounts by a literate and literary librarian on the background of his profession.

I found myself thinking about some of the historical themes that the author does not address. For example, the role of books and collections of books in major religions. Can a religious tradition have a continuous tradition over centuries or millennia, and can it spread to tens of millions of believers without sacred books and an accumulation of texts? Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism all have their fundamental texts.

I found a riverine analogy interesting in thinking about the theme of this book. In the middle ages in Europe there was a trickle of books, copied by hand, and serving a limited community of people who could read and write. Libraries were tiny, found in monasteries, and limited to bibles and religious texts. (Fortunately, Byzantium and Islam kept book culture alive and available to spark a revival in Europe.)

Technology, book collections, and the reading population co-evolved from a trickle to a flood of information. The technology for producing books evolved and books were produced ever more inexpensively in ever greater numbers. Libraries evolved until today the Library of Congress (the world's largest library) holds more than 100 million books in some 450 languages. The goal of "Education for All" which has been agreed globally for two decades, even if far from being accomplished would have been unthinkable even a century ago, much less by the ancients who saw literacy as an arcane ability to be shared only be a few scribes. Today we have a flood of book born information filling library shelves and slaking the thirst for knowledge of billions of readers.

We now see libraries of many sorts, from those serving educational facilities (from K-12 to graduate schools), to religious libraries, to those abroad supported by governments as part of their "public diplomacy", to corporate professional libraries, to community libraries. The Carnegie Corporation supported the creation of thousands of libraries in the early 20th century, and the Gates Foundation today supports development of libraries. Librarians are trained in library schools in our universities, and there is a global network of library associations.

Modern information and communications technology is again transforming our approach to literature. More books are available in digital form on the World Wide Web than are there books in paper in Harvard University (which has more books than any other university in the world). For more than a billion people, the WWW makes books by the million available in their homes. Our community libraries offer computer terminals connected to the Internet. For much of the world, where libraries are few and far between, cybercafes and community computer centers are providing poor people with access to a world of books.

The Library of Congress Reading Room