Temples of pluralism

The history of the library is hardly a tidy, cut-and-dried historical affair. As Alice Crawford, the editor of this new book, writes in her introduction, each essayist “enjoys the tangle of paradox and teases out the snarl of oppositions in an effort to articulate his or her sense of the many meanings with which ‘the library’ as a concept seems to resonate.” All the reader has to do is glance at table of contents in The Meaning of the Library, or skim any page selected at random, to appreciate the complexity of the library idea from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans up to the tumultuous digital present. The book’s convoluted prose style hardly lessens that complexity.

Initiated as a series of lectures to mark the 400^th anniversary of the King James Library at the University of St. Andrews, there is an inevitable St. Andrews-centricity to The Meaning of the Library. Editor Crawford and three contributors are based at the school, where Crawford is Digital Humanities Research Librarian. Five other contributors are at schools in England and four are from the United States. The book jacket copy touts “an international array of scholars, librarians, writers, and critics.” Technically, this may be correct in the narrowest sense, but the book feels less like an international array and more like a small, rarefied team hailing from Albion, with additional players drafted from the States. With that there were voices from Cairo, Venice, and Singapore in the broader sense of “international” (and a few less academic-sounding voices, to boot).

That said, there is probably something for everyone in The Meaning of the Library, should you happen to spot it (the old-fashioned way on a library shelf). You will have to pick away at the collection with your own curiosity acting as a guide. I read the book cover-to-cover, comparable to sitting through 12 lectures practically nonstop. If you are a civilian reader, reading the book of your own volition, you will want to selectively navigate the offerings.

I benefited especially from two essays found in the book’s Part 1—its “The Library Through Time” section. Professor Edith Hall’s “Adventures in Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries,” the collection’s lead essay, contains the observation that: “the ancient experiment in the creation of collections of texts that could even attempt to include everything that had ever been written in the history of the world changed our mental landscape forever, and so did the idea that the entire memory of the human race was vulnerable to complete erasure.” These two paired notions resonate throughout the entire book. “Bravely, too,” Hall suggests that “the influence of the library in ancient civilizations may not always have been benign,” to quote from Alice Crawford’s introduction. Hall writes, for example, that “almost as quickly as Ptolemy had brought the great poets of his new empire to its headquarters in Alexandria, innovation in Greek poetry ceased almost altogether.” Too much of good a thing—i.e., books—and fealty to the throne may have nipped creativity in the bud.

I also enthusiastically starred and underlined Andrew Pettegree’s essay, “The Renaissance Library and the Challenge of Print.” Despite the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, an unprecedented period of library building did not follow, as might have been expected. In fact, during the sixteenth century libraries took a step backward. The profusion of printed books diminished the allure of libraries for Europe’s ruling elites—the very people who, earlier, had instigated the construction of glorious libraries as personal symbols of “wealth and cultural aspiration.” But at the same time, after the book became commonplace during the sixteenth century, “This empowered whole new classes of reader [sic]. Men and women who could previously not have hoped to own a single book could now own many.”

Other chapters from The Meaning of the Library, Part 1, examine how the Medieval library was represented in...