Library
An Unquiet History
Published on 7. February 2011
256 pages
978-0-393-07862-6 (ISBN)
Description
"Splendidly articulate, informative and provoking....A book to be savored and gone back to."—Baltimore Sun
On the survival and destruction of knowledge, from Alexandria to the Internet. 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 Boston to Baghdad, 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. He explores how libraries are built and how they are destroyed, from the decay of the great Alexandrian library to scroll burnings in ancient China to the destruction of Aztec books by the Spanish—and in our own time, the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia. Encyclopedic in its breadth and novelistic in its telling, this volume will occupy a treasured place on the bookshelf next to Baker's Double Fold, Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, Manguel's A History of Reading, and Winchester's The Professor and the Madman.More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Windows
ISBN-13
978-0-393-07862-6 (9780393078626)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
06/2004
WW Norton & Co
€32.37
Article exhausted; check different version
Person
Matthew Battles is the author of Palimpsest and Library: An Unquiet History and a program fellow at the Berkman Center of Harvard University, where he is associate director of metaLAB, a research group exploring the bounds of networked culture.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1: Reading the Library
- Chapter 2: Burning Alexandria
- Chapter 3: The House of Wisdom
- Chapter 4: The Battle of the Books
- Chapter 5: Books for All
- Chapter 6: Knowledge on Fire
- Chapter 7: Lost in the Stacks
- Afterword
- Notes
- Praise for Library: An Unquiet History
- Copyright
