Enlightened Librarian: Report from the labyrinth

Report from the labyrinth · Jan 31, 03:38 PM

In Library: An Unquiet History Matthew Battles writes many beautiful sentences about the poetry and pathos of libraries, which are both echo chambers of society and too-frequent targets for eradication. As a cultural historian Battles proceeds boldly, and the book is a fine introduction to the major epochs of library and bibliographic development. From the book burnings of despots to the textual reverence of Judaism and Islam, Battles argues convincingly that how a society treats texts provides a clear window on how it tolerates ideas.

I fault his editor, though, for keeping the book short and sweet; it covers too much ground too quickly, yet also suffers from a meandering tendency—a charming characteristic of many bibliophiles, but dangerous in a short work (214 pages) in which pacing is key. (In recounting the intellectual wars of 18th Century England, for example, Battles’ overly long description of Jonathan Swift’s 1704 short story, “Battle of the Books,” throws the narrative off balance and tips it toward a cabinet of curiosities rather than an eclectic, but measured, history. I imagine the distended passage resulted from Battles’ editor saying that the book needed more action halfway through—as though purchasers of a history of libraries might need a jolt of excitement to keep reading to the end!) To his credit, Battles, a rare-books librarian at Harvard, recognizes the fallibility of tackling a history of a place that embodies all ideas. To undertake a history of the library as a cultural idea is to try to map a labyrinth:

From age to age, libraries grow and change, flourish and disappear, blossom and contract—and yet through them all we’re chasing after Alexandria, seeking a respite on Parnassus, haunted by the myths of knowledge and of wholeness that books spawn when massed in their millions. The divine irony that Borges discovered while groping his way through the stacks strikes the sighted librarian just as powerfully: preserving themselves, the books elude us. And yet it’s this that inspires more books, goading us to finish them, to complete the set, to add another book to the collection.

Matthew Battles. Library: An Unquiet History. New York: WW Norton, 2003.

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