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Library: An Unquiet History

Matthew Battles · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-Day Iraq

Fernando Baez · 354 pages

A product of 10 years' research and support from leading American and European universities, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books traces the tragic story which encapsulates: the smashed tablets of ancient Sumer; the widespread looting of libraries in post-war Iraq; the levelling of the Library of Alexandria; the burning of books by Crusaders and Nazis; and censorship against authors. Wi

CensorshipLibrariesHistoryBookish
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A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf · 129 pages

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m

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The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future

Robert Darnton · 218 pages

"In The Case for Books, Robert Darnton offers an in-depth examination of the book from its earliest beginnings to its shifting role today in popular culture, commerce, and the academy. In a lasting collection drawn from previously published and new work alike, Robert Darnton lends unique authority to the life and role of the book in society. The resulting book is a wise work of scholarship - one t

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The Library at Night

Alberto Manguel · 381 pages

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When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II

Molly Guptill Manning · 288 pages

"When America entered World War II in 1941, [it] faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 mil

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Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics

Chris Grabenstein · 288 pages

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A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

Nicholas A. Basbanes · 638 pages

The passion to possess books has never been more widespread than it is today; indeed, obsessive book collecting remains the only hobby to have a disease named after it. A Gentle Madness is an adventure among the afflicted. Author Nicholas Basbanes, a dedicated bibliophile himself, begins his book 2,200 years ago in Alexandria, when a commitment was made to gather all the world's knowledge benea

BookishLibrariesHistoryNonfiction
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino · 260 pages

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel capable of endless possibilities in an intricately crafted, spellbinding story about writing and reading. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a feat of striking in

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The Most Beautiful Libraries Of The World

Jacques Bosser, Guillaume de Laubier · 248 pages

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Paper and Fire

Rachel Caine · 378 pages

"In Ink and Bone, New York Times bestselling author Rachel Caine introduced a world where knowledge is power, and power corrupts absolutely. Now she continues the story of those who dare to defy the Great Library--and rewrite history.... With an iron fist, the Great Library controls the knowledge of the world, ruthlessly stamping out all rebellion and in the name of the greater good forbidding the

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This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

Marilyn Johnson · 280 pages

Buried in info? Cross-eyed over technology? From the bottom of a pile of paper and discs, books, e-books, and scattered thumb drives comes a cry of hope: Make way for the librarians! They want to help. They're not selling a thing. And librarians know best how to beat a path through the googolplex sources of information available to us, writes Marilyn Johnson, whose previous book, The Dead Beat, br

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Americus

M.K. Reed · 215 pages

Oklahoma teen Neal Barton stands up for his favorite fantasy series, The Chronicles of Apathea Ravenchilde, when conservative Christians try to bully the town of Americus into banning it from the public library.

LibrariesCensorshipBookish
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Libraries in the Ancient World

Lionel Casson · 177 pages

"This book tells the story of ancient libraries from their very beginnings, when "books" were clay tablets and writing was a new phenomenon. Renowned classicist Lionel Casson takes us on a lively tour, from the royal libraries of the most ancient Near East, through the private and public libraries of Greece and Rome, down to the first Christian monastic libraries. To the founders of the first pub

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I Work at a Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks

Gina Sheridan · 157 pages

From a patron's missing wetsuit to the scent of crab cakes wafting through the stacks, Sheridan showcases the oddities that have come across her circulation desk: encounters with local eccentrics; bizarre reference requests; and heart-warming stories of patrons who roam the stacks every day.

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Ban This Book

Alan Gratz · 255 pages

"A fourth grader fights back when From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg is challenged by a well-meaning parent and taken off the shelves of her school library. Amy Anne is shy and soft-spoken, but don't mess with her when it comes to her favorite book in the whole world. Amy Anne and her lieutenants wage a battle for the books that will make you laugh and pump yo

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The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading

Phyllis Rose · 271 pages

"Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment--to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ-LES. Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction,

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The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

Josh Hanagarne · 296 pages

The story of how a Mormon kid with Tourette's found salvation in books and weight-lifting.

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The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

Joshua Hammer · 353 pages

Led by mild-mannered archivist and historian Abdel Kader Haidara, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean's Eleven to save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from destruction by Al Qaeda.

LibrariesHistoryNonfictionRare Books
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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Stephen Greenblatt · 356 pages

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manus

LibrariesHistoryNonfictionRare Books
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The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

Miles Harvey · 405 pages

"The Island of Lost Maps is the story of a curious crime spree: the theft of scores of valuable centuries-old maps from some of the most prominent research libraries in the United States and Canada. The perpetrator was the Al Capone of cartography, a man with the unlikely name of Gilbert Bland, Jr., an enigmatic antiques dealer from south Florida whose cross-country slash-and-dash operation went v

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