cover image The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History

The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History

Edited by Alice Crawford. Princeton Univ, $35 (328p) ISBN 978-0-691-16639-1

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. (July)