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Library An Unquiet History
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Book Synopsis Library: An Unquiet History by : Matthew Battles
Download or read book Library: An Unquiet History written by Matthew Battles and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book The Library written by Arthur der Weduwen and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A sweeping, absorbing history, deeply researched, of that extraordinary and enduring phenomenon: the library' Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children's drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. In this, the first major history of its kind, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the contested and dramatic history of the library, from the famous collections of the ancient world to the embattled public resources we cherish today. Along the way, they introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world's great collections, trace the rise and fall of fashions and tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanours committed in pursuit of rare and valuable manuscripts.
Book Synopsis Libraries in the Ancient World by : Lionel Casson
Download or read book Libraries in the Ancient World written by Lionel Casson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unexpected murder in the little Cotswolds town of Colombury has everyone guessing. Before the answers are found more lives are threatened.
Download or read book The Library written by Stuart Kells and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Excellent . . . Tracks the history of that greatest of all cultural institutions." —The Washington Post Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. Some still exist today; some are lost, like those of Herculaneum and Alexandria; some have been sold or dispersed; and some never existed, such as those libraries imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries, scientific libraries, memorial libraries, personal libraries, clandestine libraries: Stuart Kells tells the stories of their creators, their prizes, their secrets, and their fate. To research this book, Kells traveled around the world with his young family like modern–day “Library Tourists.” Kells discovered that all the world’s libraries are connected in beautiful and complex ways, that in the history of libraries, fascinating patterns are created and repeated over centuries. More important, he learned that stories about libraries are stories about people, containing every possible human drama. The Library is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder. It’s a celebration of books as objects, a celebration of the anthropology and physicality of books and bookish space, and an account of the human side of these hallowed spaces by a leading and passionate bibliophile.
Download or read book The Library written by Stuart A.P. Murray and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the history of the world, libraries have been constructed, burned, discovered, raided, and cherished—and the treasures they've housed have evolved from early stone tablets to the mass-produced, bound paper books of our present day. The Library invites you to enter the libraries of ancient Greece, early China, Renaissance England, and modern-day America, and speaks to the book lover in all of us. Incorporating beautiful illustrations, insightful quotations, and many marvelous mysteries of libraries—their books, patrons, and keepers—this book is certain to provide you with a wealth of knowledge and enjoyment.
Book Synopsis Main Street Public Library by : Wayne A. Wiegand
Download or read book Main Street Public Library written by Wayne A. Wiegand and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2011-10-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has more public libraries than it has McDonald’s restaurants. By any measure, the American public library is a heavily used and ubiquitous institution. Popular thinking identifies the public library as a neutral agency that protects democratic ideals by guarding against censorship as it makes information available to people from all walks of life. Among librarians this idea is known as the “library faith.” But is the American public library as democratic as it appears to be? In Main Street Public Library, eminent library historian Wayne Wiegand studies four emblematic small-town libraries in the Midwest from the late nineteenth century through the federal Library Service Act of 1956, and shows that these institutions served a much different purpose than is so often perceived. Rather than acting as neutral institutions that are vital to democracy, the libraries of Sauk Centre, Minnesota; Osage, Iowa; Rhinelander, Wisconsin; and Lexington, Michigan, were actually mediating community literary values and providing a public space for the construction of social harmony. These libraries, and the librarians who ran them, were often just as susceptible to the political and social pressures of their time as any other public institution. By analyzing the collections of all four libraries and revealing what was being read and why certain acquisitions were passed over, Wiegand challenges both traditional perceptions and professional rhetoric about the role of libraries in our small-town communities. While the American public library has become essential to its local community, it is for reasons significantly different than those articulated by the “library faith.”
Book Synopsis Part of Our Lives by : Wayne A. Wiegand
Download or read book Part of Our Lives written by Wayne A. Wiegand and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges conventional thinking and top-down definitions, instead drawing on the library user's perspective to argue that the public library's most important function is providing commonplace reading materials and public space. Challenges a professional ethos about public libraries and their responsibilities to fight censorship and defend intellectual freedom. Demonstrates that the American public library has been (with some notable exceptions) a place that welcomed newcomers, accepted diversity, and constructed community since the end of the 19th century. Shows how stories that cultural authorities have traditionally disparaged- i.e. books that are not "serious"- have often been transformative for public library users.
Book Synopsis Burning the Books by : Richard Ovenden
Download or read book Burning the Books written by Richard Ovenden and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.
Download or read book Palimpsest written by Matthew Battles and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-07-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound, eloquent meditation on the history of writing, from Mesopotamia to multimedia. Why does writing exist? What does it mean to those who write? Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. Portrayed in mythology as either a gift from heroes or a curse from the gods, it has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine; a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition. Now, as the revolution once wrought by the printed word gives way to the digital age, many fear that the art of writing, and the nuanced thinking nurtured by writing, are under threat. But writing itself, despite striving for permanence, is always in the midst of growth and transfiguration. Celebrating the impulse to record, invent, and make one's mark, Matthew Battles reenchants the written word for all those susceptible to the power and beauty of writing in all of its forms.
Book Synopsis The Library Beyond the Book by : Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp
Download or read book The Library Beyond the Book written by Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp and published by metaLABprojects. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles reflect on what libraries have been in order to speculate about what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels. They combine the cultural history of libraries with innovations at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of digital humanities.
Download or read book Widener written by Matthew Battles and published by Widener Library. This book was released on 2004 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1915, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library has led a spirited life as Harvard's physical and, in a sense, its spiritual heart. With copious illustrations and wide-ranging narrative, this book is not only a record of benefactors and collections; it is the tale of the students, scholars, and staff who give a great library its life.
Book Synopsis Library: An Unquiet History by : Matthew Battles
Download or read book Library: An Unquiet History written by Matthew Battles and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the evolution of the library through the centuries.
Book Synopsis Transferred Illusions by : Marilyn Deegan
Download or read book Transferred Illusions written by Marilyn Deegan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the forms and institutions of print - newspapers, books, scholarly editions, publishing, libraries - as they relate to and are changed by emergent digital forms and institutions. In the early 1990s hypertext was briefly hailed as a liberating writing tool for non-linear creation. Fast forward no more than a decade, and we are reading old books from screens. It is, however, the newspaper, for around two hundred years print's most powerful mass vehicle, whose economy persuasively shapes its electronic remediation through huge digitization initiatives, dominated by a handful of centralizing service providers, funded and wrapped round by online advertising. The error is to assume a culture of total replacement. The Internet is just another information space, sharing characteristics that have always defined such spaces - wonderfully effective and unstable, loaded with valuable resources and misinformation; that is, both good and bad. This is why it is important that writers, critics, publishers and librarians - in modern parlance, the knowledge providers - be critically engaged in shaping and regulating cyberspace, and not merely the passive instruments or unreflecting users of the digital tools in our hands.
Book Synopsis The Library by : James W. P. Campbell
Download or read book The Library written by James W. P. Campbell and published by Pushkin Children's Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A library is not just a collection of books, but also the buildings that house them. From the great dome of the Library of Congress, to the white facade of the Seinäjoki Library in Finland, the architecture of a library is a symbol of its time as well as of its builders' wealth, culture, and learning.
Download or read book The Library Book written by Susan Orlean and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.
Book Synopsis History of the Los Angeles County Free Library 1912-1927 by : Los Angeles County Public Library
Download or read book History of the Los Angeles County Free Library 1912-1927 written by Los Angeles County Public Library and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Academic Library in the United States by : Mark L. McCallon
Download or read book The Academic Library in the United States written by Mark L. McCallon and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances the belief that the library--more than any other cultural institution--collects, curates and distributes the results of human thought. Essays broaden the debate about academic libraries beyond only professional circles, promoting the library as a vital resource for the whole of higher education. Topics range from library histories to explorations of changing media. Essayists connect modern libraries to the remarkable dream of Alexandria's ancient library--facilitating groundbreaking research in every imaginable field of human interest, past, present and future. Academic librarians who are most familiar with historical traditions are best qualified to promote the library as an important aspect of teaching and learning, as well as to develop resources that will enlighten future generations of readers. The intellectual tools for compelling, constructive conversation come from the narrative of the library in its many iterations, from the largest research university to the smallest liberal arts or community college.
