Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.” ) Eventually, newspapers, penny dreadfuls, book mobiles and more emerged and they all made reading cheaper, easier and generally accessible to the masses. Literature slowly but surely had made its way to every part of society (more or less, it still had ways to go). The written word had gone from mystic force to public resource. LIBRARIES, whether local public libraries, large university libraries, or magnificent specialist research libraries, tend to be associated with silence, serenity, and stability. This book invites us to think again. Andrew Pettegree, Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, and Arthur der Weduwen, deputy director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue which Pettegree founded, take us on a hair-raising journey through the long history of libraries, starting with the Assyrians and demonstrating just how fragile libraries are. But of course libraries have only been this wonderful thing for a very short period of time. The idea of all the riffraff of my kind being allowed all that access to books — well, that idea would be very alien to the “connoisseurs” throughout history. Libraries weren’t for the idle pleasure or even the sharing of common knowledge; they were meant for the privileged few. In this book the authors trace the library history and the evolution of library from scholastic monastery collections to university collections and private hoards of book wealth to subscription libraries to wonderful public libraries as we know them.

The educated and affluent part of our community takes it for granted that public funding of the arts and the facilitation of recreational reading is part of the core functions of government. But the public library – in the sense of a funded collection available free to anyone who wants to use it – has only existed since the mid nineteenth century, a mere fraction of the history of the library as a whole. If there is one lesson from the centuries-long story of the library, it is that libraries only last as long as people find them useful.”

Church Times/Sarum College:

Some did, of course, such as the Fife-based “think tank”, the Adam Smith Institute, which proposed introducing fees. We were in the era of Thatcher and everything upon which cohesive communities were built was vulnerable. This was such an amazing and thorough recounting of the make up and scope of libraries from ancient times until now. I was impressed with the amount of detail and research that went into this and the writing was far from dry as it wove through time and scope. Such a church will combine “a certain level of continuity with its cultural setting,” while also holding a loving, constructively critical posture toward that culture. It’s neither a baptized replica of whatever the local unbelievers think and do nor a curmudgeonly voice that only speaks in negative, condemnatory tones about its neighbors. The church inhabits culture differently.

This book is both informative and easy to read, and goes to all sorts of unexpected places. Come to think of it, that is much like a decent library, isn’t it? The New York Public Library hosts events online, in person, and/or outdoors. The following information applies to online events. Public Notice & Disclaimer Libraries will continue to exist as long as people use their resources. A thriving library is managed effectively by people who work to understand the needs of their community and develop their collections to meet those current needs and anticipate future needs. They are forward thinking. I wanted to end this review with a picture of the state library of Stuttgart (capital of my state) but when I showed it to a friend of mine and asked what he thought of it, he said it reminded him of a mall bookstore. I asked him if the US / Canada actually had bookstores that big and he said "several". Then he told be of the library of Chicago with its 7 stories and GARGOYLES. I feel … very small now and shall refrain from showing the picture. *lol* He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.There is a particularly good section that discusses the rise in women readers as well as the popularity of romance novels. Considering how little respect the romance genre and romance readers do seem to get from various histories and commenters on books, it was a nice nod to see two authors highlight the positivity of the genre. They begin with the fabled library of Alexandria (in Egypt, not Dunbartonshire), which is believed to have existed around the third century BC. No-one knows exactly the extent of its collection but estimates suggest it housed around 200,000 scrolls; there may have been as many as half a million. Even by modern standards these were phenomenal accumulations, requiring organised accessioning, systematic cataloguing and a cadre of talented scholars engaged as librarians. What happened to the library is lost in the mists of time. Pettegree and Weduken’s best guess is that it was destroyed during a Roman invasion. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, by Maryanne Wolf — NYPL Catalog ; NYPL Talking Books ; Bookshare In 2016, my late colleague Larry Hurtado’s Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World offered a compelling explanation of early Christianity’s rapid spread in an initially hostile Roman culture. Although Hurtado’s book is not in any sense a missiological textbook, its account of the early church’s growth nonetheless reminded readers of an important principle: churches that grow are simultaneously familiar and foreign to their host cultures. N.B. This event will take place in-person at The London Library with limited capacity and in alignment with up-to-date government COVID recommendations. Please read our Event Access and COVID Guidelines before you arrive. Doors (and the bar) open at 7.10pm for a 7.30pm start.