Library: An Unquiet History kicks off by quoting a passage by Thomas Wolfe from Of Time and The River in which a man who works in a large library is beset by book panic, realizing that no matter how fast he reads he will never be able to read all the books in the library. It then goes on to tell the history of libraries (in the sense of collections of books that may or may not be available to the public), with an emphasis on how libraries rise and fall and how their structures and purposes change along with other cultural changes. The reader is left with a sense that while humanity’s desire to acquire, absorb, and control knowledge is eternal, but libraries themselves are terribly perishable.

This book briefly follows the history of the library from Mesopotamia through today. Its focus is predominantly but not exclusively Western – for instance, there are discussions of collections in China, The Aztec Empire, and Tibet. It talks about huge libraries and tiny libraries, the forebears of today’s Little Free Library. It talks about what books have been deemed worthy of collection and why, and how libraries have been organized. It turns out that the organization of libraries has a lot of philosophy and politics behind it.

Here are a few snippets of trivia from the book:

• The Great Library of Alexandria caught fire many times, both from arson and from accidents, but its greatest damage came not from fire but from neglect (Christians found its collection to be too heathen and they let it rot).
• Melville Dewey (who later shortened his name to Melvil) fought to admit women to the School of Library Economy at Columbia. Alas, this was not an intentional blow for feminism. Dewey believed that librarians should have low professional status in comparison to professors. He thought librarians should be limited to sorting and cataloging, not choosing books or directing reading. He figured women were pretty low in status already so that would encourage people to give less professional respect to librarians.
• Super, super depressing fact: Books are very hard to burn, especially if you are trying to burn them into ash. If you are ever in a position where you want to burn a book for political reasons, STOP IT. STOP RIGHT NOW. If you are trying to burn a book to stay warm or cook food, as people did during the siege of Sarajevo, or to avoid being arrested by the Nazis, you have to fan the pages and let air circulate or you just get a charred brick.

As you may gather from that last fact, this book is as much about the destruction of libraries as it is about their creation, use, and organizations. This is tough emotional reading. There are massacres and wars and people die horribly and so many books are destroyed. This is important stuff to know, but it’s also very painful to read about.

What makes this edifying as opposed to just an exercise in awfulness is that book collections have been destroyed for different reasons, and preserved for different reasons, and understanding that gives the reader a deeper view of history and culture, even when it’s enraging.

The book is important, and it’s very much worth reading, and it’s well-written. However, you should be prepared for discussions, some brief and some detailed, about physical and cultural genocide and human rights abuses, in contexts including but not limited to the rule of Shi Huangdi in China, the Spanish conquest of the Mayans, the Nazis’ campaigns to burn books and pillage libraries through Europe, and the Siege of Sarajevo. America is not off the hook, since one way to control African Americans was to forbid them to read and, later, to deny them access to libraries. The famous African American author Richard Wright was only able to check out books by using a white man’s library card. Wright told the librarian that he was picking up the books for the man, as an assigned errand. The librarian was hesitant to give him the books but Wright claimed that he couldn’t read.

I did not find this book to be a huge page-turner. Sometimes I was into it, sometimes it was a slog, sometimes it was inspiring and sometimes it was upsetting. However, I did find that it sunk into my brain. It made me think about what the library is for, how people’s ideas about what it’s for have changed, and how I want to use it. The library as we know it is both meticulously planned and crazily haphazard, eternal and ephemeral. I picture these collections as eternal but they are not – which makes me treasure them all the more.