Library: An Unquiet History!

Our book today is Library: An Unquiet History, a hymn of praise from 2003 to public libraries. It’s written by Matthew Battles, who worked at the Houghton Library (and lived in scenic Jamaica Plain!) at the time, and its touchstone throughout is Harvard’s mighty Widener Library, whose wonders he very effectively evokes:

The library … is no mere cabinet of curiosities; its a world, complete and uncompletable, and it is filled with secrets. Like a world, it has its changes and its seasons, which belie the permanence that ordered ranks of books imply. Tugged by the gravity of readers’ desires, books flow in and out of the library like the tides. The people who shelve the books [at Harvard’s Widener Library] talk about the library’s breathing – at the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds; at end of term, the library inhales, and the books fly back. So the library is a body, too, the pages of books pressed together like organs in the darkness.

(The changes in the general accessibility of the Widener in the last 13 years – it’s become a great stone fortress more dedicated to keeping readers out than inviting them in, and of course wandering in the stacks will now get you tasered or perhaps executed outright – are of course not a part of this book, although it can’t help but hover over the contents a bit)

Battles takes his readers on a canned but lively short history of libraries and the large gallery of cranks, prophets, and oddballs who’ve always tended to gravitate toward libraries. He has a great ear for anecdotes, and he’s very good at popularizing history (a skill that’s tricker than it looks). But my favorite thread running through the book is the tone of deep appreciation for the spirit of libraries and the books that fill them, which offer both happiness and escape, an open haven from the mindless bustle of the outside world. The public library is such a strange concept at its heart that I’m a sucker for books about that concept, and Library: An Unquiet History is one of my favorites from recent years.

Of course, this book being written when it was, Battles is naturally concerned toward the end of his account with the future of libraries in the advent of the digital era. This particular worry cropped up all over the Republic of Letters back in the early aughts, and Battles sounds the note of caution as well:

The library of the digital age is in a state of flux, which is indistinguishable from a state of crisis – not only for institutions but for the books they contain preserve, and propagate, a crisis for the culture of letters whose roots are firmly planted in the library. The universal library pretended to answer the question “What belongs in the library?” And yet in a world that seems to make ever more room for information, this question retains its ancient force.

In the years since this book first saw print, the question “What belongs in the library?” has, I’m happy to report, been answered in mostly wonderful ways. The public library as an institution is in remarkably healthy shape in 2016, a year by which some of the more gloomy prognosticators of the 1990s predicted it would have completely disappeared. Computers abound. Audio books are explosively popular. Overdrive and programs like it allow patrons to “check out” e-books, but those same patrons haven’t stopped checking out printed books. Most libraries have managed – in their gallumphing but well-intentioned way – to make the transition from repositories of books to community centers, and although this might make some die-hard researchers grumble, it’s an undeniably happy change.

As is made merrily clear in Matthew Battles’ book, the real answer to “What belongs in the library?” hasn’t changed for centuries: people. The challenge for libraries is how to keep that true, and while bastions like the Widener have failed at it, the public libraries that are the main subject of this book have adapted better than I myself would ever have guessed back in 2003.