A history of libraries is much more than a compendium of buildings: it’s also a story about the history of art, science, technology, culture, belief and education – and how all these strands mesh together
- Dr James Campbell
In 1975 archaeologists investigating the palace of the ancient city of Elba in Syria uncovered a room containing fragments of some 15,000 inscribed tablets. The shelves that once held them had collapsed but, scattered on the ground, the tablets remained roughly in the order in which they had been placed some 4,000 years ago. In 2012 a tiny library opened across the world in Jiaojiehe, north of Beijing. Its Chinese architect designed this exquisite building with an area where visitors can sit by the fire and sip tea, read and dream.
The Library: A World History (Thames & Hudson) by Dr James Campbell, an architectural historian in the Department of Architecture at Cambridge University, is the scholarly and highly readable story of what happened between the making of the earliest libraries and the design of their modern counterparts. It is a journey that takes the reader through some of the grandest libraries in the world which in their various ways reflect mankind’s preoccupation with learning as represented by books in all their guises.
Read the full story
Image: Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris
Credit: Will Pryce
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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