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.
