Ancient Libraries

Ancient Libraries
Author: Jason König
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2013-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107244587

The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.

Library: An Unquiet History

Library: An Unquiet History
Author: Matthew Battles
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2011-02-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0393078620

"Splendidly articulate, informative and provoking....A book to be savored and gone back to."—Baltimore Sun On the survival and destruction of knowledge, from Alexandria to the Internet. Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library, from socialist reading rooms and rural home libraries to the Information Age. He explores how libraries are built and how they are destroyed, from the decay of the great Alexandrian library to scroll burnings in ancient China to the destruction of Aztec books by the Spanish—and in our own time, the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia. Encyclopedic in its breadth and novelistic in its telling, this volume will occupy a treasured place on the bookshelf next to Baker's Double Fold, Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, Manguel's A History of Reading, and Winchester's The Professor and the Madman.

Public Library System in India

Public Library System in India
Author: C. A. Augustine
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1990
Genre: Library legislation
ISBN:

Festschrift honoring M.N. Ramakrishnan Nayar, b. 1929, professor and head, Dept. of Library and Information Science, University of Kerala, on his superannuation in 1989; comprises papers presented at a seminar, Trivandrum, 1989.