The Meaning of the Library

May 18, 2015
Editor Crawford culls together a collection of essays from lectures originally given at University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she is a librarian. The collection is meant to survey the various conceptions through which Western civilization has understood its binding institution, with an eye toward understanding the library in its current digital upheaval. The historical chapters chisel away at the monolithic idea of the library as an attempt to collect all human knowledge by showing how the institution worked in specific times and places. Topics covered include the library’s genesis in ancient Greece, the magnificent Renaissance libraries and their tragic misfortunes, adventures smuggling books during the Enlightenment, and tensions between authors and institutions, as contemporary research libraries seek to build noteworthy manuscript collections. Anglophones who have spent time in the stacks will enjoy hunting for familiar elements among the historical bedrock, including the emergence of the powerful democratic notion of the public library in the 19th century. Erudite essays explore the library in fiction, poetry, and film, from the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and the poetry of Robert Burns to Truffaut’s Farenheit 451. All told, however, the book is addressed to academics and librarians more than to lay bibliophiles.

April 15, 2015
The invention and reinvention of libraries. Before the printing press, only royals and scholars collected books. A personal library of more than 1,000 volumes was considered huge, "the work of a lifetime." But by the 16th century, Europe abounded in some 9 million volumes; the book became "no longer an object of wonder, but an everyday aspect of life." Crawford (New Directions for Academic Liaison Librarians, 2012, etc.), digital humanities research librarian at the University of St. Andrews Library in Scotland, has gathered a dozen illuminating essays by distinguished historians, librarians, and literary scholars about the past, present, and future of the often rarefied space known as the library. Victorianist John Sutherland looks at the growth of public libraries in 19th-century Britain, where the hardback, three-volume novel was unaffordable for ordinary readers. By the 1890s, a new publishing venture followed a hardback first issue with a cheap edition costing a few shillings. This forerunner of the paperback led to the growth of the personal library. Free public libraries, along with fee-based lending libraries, led to a burgeoning readership. At the popular Railway Library, travelers could buy a cheap, pocket-sized book for a journey or even rent one, "borrowed at a departure station and returned at the destination station." Among essayists on how libraries have been imagined in fiction, poetry, and film, Oxford professor Laura Marcus describes libraries in movies as "repositories of secret or occulted knowledge." In Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, for example, the library is inhabited by angels "who act as the comforters of the living and are able to listen in to their subconscious thoughts." In Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, "the human mind and memory" hold libraries. Stephen Enniss, director of the esteemed Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, offers a fascinating look at assembling writers' archives, complicated by the ubiquity of electronic files. A rich, informative, and engaging collection.

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June 1, 2015
If there's one thing to be learned from this anthology of essays about the significance of libraries across history, it is that a library can have at least as many meanings as it has patrons. Age-old questions arise: Does a collection of physical texts mire the reader in a dead past, or do books act as springboard, launching the reader to new heights? Today's library issues may not be so different from those of old: Robert Darnton points out that 300 years ago piracy was perhaps even more rampant than it is today. One essay traces the library's role in fiction, and another does the same, but in poetry. The academics who have contributed these learned essays tend to write for one another's approval and not for a general audience. Nevertheless, for both scholar and casual reader, comprehensive bibliographic notes constitute a multilingual gold mine of historical resources on libraries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)