num_pages: 272
description: Engrossingly saturated with fascinating lore colorful anecdotes and deft portraits. Hilarie M. Sheets New York Times Through the ages libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped inspired and obliterated knowledge. Now they are in crisis. Former rare books librarian and Harvard metaLAB visionary Matthew Battles takes us from Boston to Baghdad from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries and on to the Information Age to explore how libraries are built and how they are destroyed: from the scroll burnings in ancient China to the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia to the latest revolutionary upheavals of the digital age. A new afterword elucidates how knowledge is preserved amid the creative destruction of twenty-first-century technology. 10 illustrations
language: English
title: Library: An Unquiet History
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company