Library: An Unquiet History by Battles Matthew

Author:Battles, Matthew [Battles, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-06T21:00:00+00:00

Just so were Swift’s ancients “pranked out” in tragic splendor. Après ça, le déluge—and we have in this keening a recognition of the perishability of books as objects, which always threatens to triumph over the immortality of the book as ideal. From here, Irving moves on to a dilation of the troubles of the modern library, in terms Swift would have found congenial. He notes that formerly books were rare enough to remain truly precious; men treasured and protected them for all the difficulty they went through in making and obtaining them. “But the inventions of paper and the press have put an end to all these restraints,” Irving observes, and “the consequences are alarming.”

The stream of literature has expanded into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea. A few centuries since, five or six manuscripts consituted a great library; but what would you say to libraries such as actually exist, containing three or four hundred thousand volumes; legions of authors at the same time busy; and the press going on with fearfully increasing activity, to double and quadruple the number? . . . [T]he world will inevitably be overstocked with good books. It will soon be the employment of a lifetime merely to learn their names. Many a man of passable information, at the present day, reads scarcely anything but reviews; and before long a man of erudition will be little better than a mere walking catalogue.

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