|
|
5.0étoiles sur 5
Librarians, Libraries, and Library Destructions, Aoû 2 2003
Last April during the war raging in Baghdad, a mob set fire to the "House of Wisdom," the national library of Iraq. Almost all of its books and ephemera were burned. Burning a library seems a particularly vicious and sad thing to do, but it would not have surprised Matthew Battles. He works at the rare books section at Harvard's library, and he has written _Library: An Unquiet History_ (W. W. Norton), a tour of libraries through history, and what becomes of them. Those of us who frequently use our local libraries and even take them for granted may reflect with pleasure on the anomalous (and deceptive) permanence of our particular library. Battles writes, "There is no library that does not ultimately disappear." Some of them are done in by natural causes, and plenty more are deliberately destroyed to make a social or revisionary point. There is more to libraries than their destructions, of course, and more to Battles's book. It is full of well-written and surprising paragraphs, brimming with erudition, and part of its attractiveness is that he has not stuck to any structural plan. This is not an attempt at a comprehensive history of libraries, but it does take into account a lot of history. "By bringing books together in one place, cultures and kings inevitably make of them a sacrifice to time." Though the destructions of libraries by Shi Huangdi (who started the Great Wall of China), through the Nazis and into Sarajevo are necessary subjects here, the grimness is lightened by portraits of eminent librarians. For instance, cataloging by means of the famous Dewey Decimal System was invented by Melville Dewey, born in 1851; he was a spelling reformer and changed his name to Melvil. The seventeen-year-old Dewey inhaled a great deal of smoke as he rescued books from the flames when his school caught fire, and the subsequent cough led doctors to predict his death within two years. This taught him he had no time to lose, and though he lived to be eighty, he was always a genius for efficiency. He did not invent the card catalogue; it is a surprise to find that Edward Gibbon did so, putting his library's inventory onto playing cards. But Dewey standardized the catalog, as he did much other library furniture and gadgets such as date stamps. He also pioneered the systematic education of librarians and helped found the American Library Association. Battles traces the constant conflict about what libraries should contain; some say they must include everything, others say they should include only the best of everything. The arguments on the issue have been spirited, especially when joined by Jonathan Swift, frequently cited here, who insisted not only on the best contents for libraries, but concentration on just the classics. He would have been dismayed by our popularization of libraries. Surely, however, he would have found the modern library a wonderful place to pick out the odd fact, or to wonder at the oddities (lovable or not) of humanity; readers will find _Library_ quite good for this, too.
|
