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CityReads | 7 Books on Libraries

Richard Ovenden 城读 2022-07-13

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7 Books on Libraries
Knowledge is power and nowhere has it been better preserved down the millennia than in libraries. Here Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books and the librarian in charge of Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries, talks us through books that shed light on what libraries are and what they do, and why they remain absolutely vital in our digital age.


Source:

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/libraries-richard-ovenden/



1. John Willis Clark, 2017. The Care of Books: An Essay on the Development of Libraries and Their Fittings, From the Earliest Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century.

 
Originally published in 1901, this book was written by John Willis Clark, a British architectural scholar and expert in antiquarianism. It is a fascinating, detailed and rigorous work of historical scholarship that brings together a variety of sources to provide a detailed account of the history of human book management over more than two thousand years, and it contains a number of carefully collected old photographs (156 illustrations) that show the magnificent interior of libraries. This book can be used as a starting point for understanding library management.

2 Eric Klinenberg, 2019. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, Crown.
 


We are living in a time of deep divisions. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together and find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done?
 
In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how "social infrastructure" is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges.
 
One of the key aspects of Eric's book is this idea that libraries—and he's really talking about public libraries—are social infrastructure. He talks very eloquently about the New York Public Library system, and particularly about the branch libraries, how they are places where public education can take place, where the patrons are not judged by how much money they have, but are treated equally, no matter what segment of society they come from. They are open long hours, sometimes they're there simply to provide a warm place for people to gather. Sometimes they're the only place that young people can go for quiet study if they have an assignment to do for their school, because their home is too noisy or disruptive. Sometimes they are places where people go to find bits of information for practical reasons, like they're starting a small business, and they don't have the resources to get information in other ways.
 
Not everybody has access to the internet. The digitally disenfranchised are an extraordinary segment of the population and that's also where public libraries are very valuable. Not only to provide the technology, the hardware and the internet access but, much more importantly, librarians who are supportive and will help you without judging you, will guide you through the complex interfaces of a public or government digital system that you have to navigate in order to get public benefits, for example. A library might be somewhere where you can meet other people and form a community group. A local society might meet in a room that the library provides in order to, say, learn a language. There are all sorts of things that could be distilled into an app, but that doesn't necessarily mean it would be an improvement.
 
3. Susan Orlean, 2018. The Library Book, Simon & Schuster.


It tells, essentially, two narratives. One is about the destruction of the LA Public Library in 1987, through a fire. The other is more of a historical account of the evolution of the library and the librarians who worked in it, the kinds of things that they did for their community and what it's like today. I like the way that it's arranged with old-fashioned catalogue cards at the start of each chapter, which broadly identify the themes.
 
Particularly in California—which is a very digital world in the second decade of the 21st century—why would a public library in a great metropolis still have value? Why would its stories still be of interest? The answer is that the stories are gripping: how the LA Public Library responded to the First World War, or how particularly female librarians rose to the top of their profession and became the directors of the LA Public Library in the middle of the 20th century.
 
4. James W. P. Campbell and Will Pryce, 2013. The Library: A World History, University of Chicago Press.


It brings Clark up to date in that it's a long sweep of history, it begins with the ancient world and moves forward to modern libraries. Like Clark, he is an architectural historian, but his focus is much more on the architecture rather than on the functioning of libraries.
 
A library is not just a collection of books, but also the buildings that house them. As varied and inventive as the volumes they hold, such buildings can be much more than the dusty, dark wooden shelves found in mystery stories or the catacombs of stacks in the basements of academia. From the great dome of the Library of Congress, to the white façade of the Seinäjoki Library in Finland, to the ancient ruins of the library of Pergamum in modern Turkey, the architecture of a library is a symbol of its time as well as of its builders' wealth, culture, and learning.
 
Architectural historian James Campbell and photographer Will Pryce traveled the globe together, visiting and documenting over eighty libraries that exemplify the many different approaches to thinking about and designing libraries. The real strength of his book is in the section on the great European libraries of the 18th and 19th centuries. It's called a world history and there are some libraries in China and Japan that he does include, but it is predominantly about European and North American libraries.
 
5. Alberto Manguel, 2009. The Library at Night, Yale University Press.
 


Alberto Manguel was the national librarian of Argentina, the successor to Jorge Luis Borges. His private library is now 30,000 books or something like that. His collection has now been acquired by the Portuguese government as a center for writing, literacy and the appreciation of books and texts.
 
It's a series of meditations, really, on libraries. He's somebody who, in his private library, when it was in their home in France, would get up in the middle of the night and just wander in and pull books from the shelves and read them because he couldn’t sleep. It's a series of encounters with books, both books as artifacts, and as time travel.
 
"Libraries," he says, "have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic." In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.
 
Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the "complete" libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral "memory libraries" kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written. Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could.
 
6. Richard Ovenden, 2020. Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge, Belknap Press.
 


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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
"What survives is more of an ethos—the ethos that knowledge holds great power, that the pursuit of gathering it and preserving it is a valuable task, and that its loss can be an early warning sign of a decaying civilization."
 
7. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, 2021. The Library: A Fragile History, Basic Books.
 


The history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident. In The Library, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world's great collections, trace the rise and fall of literary tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanors committed in pursuit of rare manuscripts. In doing so, they reveal that while collections themselves are fragile, often falling into ruin within a few decades, the idea of the library has been remarkably resilient as each generation makes—and remakes—the institution anew.

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