The Meaning of the Library

This fascinating volume traces the history of the library through time, the library in imagination, and the library now and in future. It begins with Greeks and Romans (notably the story of Alexandria), moving onto the role of the library in mediaeval culture as a vehicle of spirituality to foster wisdom and holiness. There is an interesting table showing the number of books published between 1450 and 1600 in Europe, with Germany in the lead and a total of just over 345,000 fairly evenly divided between vernacular and scholarly. Andrew Pettigree covers the mediaeval period, which includes the development of University libraries in Oxford and Cambridge. Some libraries were plundered or destroyed, and there is an interesting example from Heidelberg, where 3,000 manuscripts and 12,000 books were sequestered by the Catholic army and taken over the Alps on mules to the Vatican library.

The Enlightenment sees the rise of the subscription library, while the modern library is said to rest on four pillars: curation, engagement with research and learning, publishing, and creating and managing spaces devoted to users and collections. The final essay by the Librarian of Congress, James Billington would be worth the price of the whole volume. It begins by characterising the statues from an ancient library in Ephesus representing Wisdom, Character, Judgement and Specialised Knowledge. The Library of Congress has its origins in the collection of Jefferson and now consists of 158 million items. For Billington, the library is a resource for knowledge-based democracy when differing opinions sit alongside each other. He laments the human loss of memory, community and language in the digital age where sentence is being obliterated in online chat rooms and the richness of language 'is replaced by a mushy melange of abbreviations, acronyms and the universalised pidgin English of air-traffic controllers and computer programmers.' Billington reminds us that reading a book can become a private conversation with someone at a time and place other than our own and that libraries are antidotes to fanaticism and temples of pluralism. His parting advice is that 'reading can balance our noisy, hurry-up, present-minded world with what Keats called "silence and slow time". Whatever else you do in life, do not fail to experience the simple pleasure of being alone with a good book on a rainy day.'