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The looting of museums and libraries is a long-established occupation which (as Matthew Battles makes clear in his loving Library: An Unquiet History) is as old as the earliest libraries themselves. The libraries of Mesopotamia were looted by conquering kings; the libraries of Rome suffered ‘the ravages of emperors, and barbarians, and angry mobs’. Between the 13th and the 15th centuries alone, ‘the extraordinary libraries of the Muslim world disappeared; its conquerors — the Mongols, the Turks, and the Crusaders — did not share the love of learning that Islam had inherited from its Greco-Persian forebears,’ Battles notes laconically. To add one heart-breaking detail to Battles’ sweeping view: during the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, the invading army threw away the contents of the libraries into the Tigris to build a bridge of paper. ‘So many books were used,’ wrote a contemporary chronicler, ‘that the waters of the river turned black with ink.’
But Battles’ brief history is as much the story of the survival of the word as it is of its dissolution. His starting-point is the Widemer Library at Harvard University where he works in the rare books section and which he describes, with justifiable swagger, as ‘the largest academic library the world has ever known’. Born from a mother’s wish to erect a lasting monument to her bibliophile son who went down with the Titanic, the Widemer Library, with its four-and-a-half million volumes, stands as a sort of counterpart memorial to the vainglorious ship that thought itself unsinkable. Dazzled by the rag-and-bone quality of the library’s treasures, Battles admits that his first mistake, when he started to work here, was to attempt to read the books. A library (as Borges famously noted and as Battles discovers) ‘is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it’s a world, complete and uncompletable’. Every reader must resign himself to the fact that most of a library’s vast geography will remain forever, to his eyes, terra incognita.
Undeterred, Battles guides the reader through the various forms of book preservation and of cataloguing, the different dangers posed by tyrants and natural disasters, the fables of bewildering greed and of knowledgeable ambition, the sagas of survival by chance, by the intelligence of a handful of brave book-lovers, by the perseverance of social reformers who believed that books were at the core of any true civilisation. Battles tells stories of readers who found salvation in libraries — Richard Wright who as a young black man in the 1930s devised strategies to use the segregated libraries of the American South — and libraries who found salvation in their readers — the Sarajevans who tried to rescue books from the burning Bosnian National and University library, shelled by the Serbs on 25 August 1992. Most important of all, in tracing the history of libraries, Battles necessarily grants the act of reading its rightful place in our daily lives. ‘Reading whatever we will,’ he says, ‘we fulfill a public function, preserving the sacrosanct space of inner thought that is our birthright.’ Let this reminder be engraved on every television set.
Library: An Unquiet History is an erudite, companionable, joyful book ideally suited for these gloomy times. Wandering through the stacks, Battle says, he has the impression that the millions of volumes around him constitute ‘not a model for but a model of the universe’. The idea is thrilling: that everything we know, that everything we believe we can know of this chaotic world, might be reflected in an orderly way on the open shelves of a library. I can think of no other place that justifies such jubilant optimism.
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