A history of libraries
Mafra Palace Library in Mafra, Portugal, built in 1771.
The Library: A World History, by James Campbell.
Review by Sarah Bakewell in the Financial Times
In 1338, the library of the Sorbonne in Paris had 1,728 manuscripts in its register, 300 of them marked lost. In 2013, the British Library has almost 100,000 times as many: around 170m items, with 3m more streaming in every year. The explosion of demands made on libraries is dizzying yet some elements remain constant: acquire good stuff, keep it safe, make it findable, and give readers a pleasant environment in which to consult it. Sounds simple.
Bibliotèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, built in 1850.
James Campbell’s new history of library architecture, with spectacular photographs by Will Pryce, takes us on a global tour of how these requirements have been fulfilled over the years, from the clay tablet storehouses of ancient Mesopotamia and the beautiful repositories of Buddhist sutra blocks and paper prints in Korea and Japan, to the grandiose designs and multimedia extravaganzas of the 21st century…
The George Peabody Library in Baltimore, built 1878.
The Library: A World History puts such creations into long perspective, showing how book technology, readers’ needs and architectural solutions have co-evolved (or, occasionally, been at loggerheads). In medieval European libraries, for example, bound manuscripts were precious and often unwieldy, so they were chained to desks. If you wanted to read a different book, you moved to the desk that went with it. Such a library survives, with collection intact, in the 1452 Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena in Italy.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 16th, 2013 at 19:47
Beautiful!
No tablet or web can beat the complete experience of being in a library.