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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