LIBRARY

Historical survey by a rare-book librarian of the defining epochs and events leading to both the destruction and proliferation of libraries.

Rebutting the stereotype of a silent sanctum in which mousy librarians maintain perfect order, the author reminds us how chaotic and impermanent these repositories of accumulated knowledge are. He contends that a library, “a world, complete and uncompletable,” draws its reason for existence from the culture in which it arises, a situation as liable to shifting social currents as the edifice housing it is subject to weather and other disasters, both natural and man-made. Battles follows the notorious “biblioclasms” of past ages, from the burning of the library at Alexandria to the bonfires of the Nazis, who destroyed more than 100 million books. He asserts that “most books are bad, very bad in fact,” and bemoans their inability to surmount the babble of their times. He does not, however, suggest that their fates are deserved; rather, that an ironic result of gathering so many volumes in a single place is that it makes them ready targets for revisionist fervor. Many small collections in obscure and scattered locations, on the other hand, ensure that more books will survive the onslaught of marauding princes, vengeful dictators, and fanatical clerics. Among the other ironies the author points out: many of the scrolls in Herculaneum survived the volcano of a.d. 79 because they burned, thereby making the charred remains amenable to spectral photography, which rendered their ancient text visible, while intact scrolls of the same age have long since crumbled into dust. Battles points out that books have always been an ephemeral experience: older manuscripts and proscribed texts were often recycled or reused, the imperfect palimpsests still visible to later readers. Yet he seems to lament the onset of the digital age, with its 800-million-page archive, by attesting that libraries now exist in a “state of flux which is indistinguishable from a state of crisis.”

A must for every home or institutional collection. (11 illustrations)