The Library Quotes

“uncomfortable truth of libraries throughout the ages: no society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations. What we will frequently see in this book is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artefacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows. The fate of many collections was to degrade in abandoned attics and ruined buildings, even if only as the prelude to renewal and rebirth in the most unexpected places.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“same battles were repeatedly replayed, marking out the library as a political space. Should readers in the new nineteenth-century public libraries have the books that they desired, or books that would make them better, more cultured people? This raging debate was still echoing deep into the twentieth century:”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“In 1748, the Earl of Chesterfield passed on some useful advice to his son:
'Buy good books and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads; for they may profit of the former. But take care not to understand editions and title-pages too well. It always smells of pedantry and not always of learning. What curious books I have, they are indeed but few... Beware of the Bibliomania.”
― Arthur der Weduwen, The Library: A Fragile History

“Yet when the ribbon was cut and the band had played, serious questions still had to be addressed. Who was the library intended to serve? Should children be admitted? What of those who saw the library mainly as a warm place to shelter while leafing through a newspaper? The issue was complicated by the fact that neither Andrew Carnegie, whose fortune funded a swathe of civic libraries across America and the United Kingdom, nor the British Public Libraries Act made provision for the purchase of books. These decisions lay in the hands of the”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“University libraries, responding to student demand, are now social hubs as much as places of work, the cathedral silence that once characterised the library a thing of the past. In this, libraries actually hark back to an earlier model, pioneered in the Renaissance, when libraries were often convivial social spaces, in which books jostled for attention alongside paintings, sculptures, coins and curiosities.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“How neglected and desolate everything looked,’ he wrote, plaintively: There was mould and rot everywhere, the debris of moths and bookworms, and a thick covering of cobwebs. The windows had not been opened for months, and not a ray of sunshine had penetrated through them to brighten the unfortunate books, which were slowly pining away: and when they were opened, what a cloud of noxious air streamed out.1”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“It is axiomatic in good library practice that a de-accessioning programme should never be undertaken during a major building project.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“the collection was unceremoniously removed to temporary warehousing, while an unspecified proportion of the books were simply dumped in landfill: some estimate 200,000 books, others half a million.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“The opportunity to present a new concept of information technology, ideally with a shiny new building attached, often proves irresistible. Nowhere has this been more disastrously demonstrated than with the new library of San Francisco, a remarkable story of hubris, misjudgement and maladministration, all to build an architectural monument to the new digital age.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“The issue of segregation in the American South posed the greatest challenge to the American Library Association, and one it conspicuously failed to meet.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“the launch of Penguin Books in 1935,”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“libraries were havens of peace in an ever more demanding society, a familiar, reassuring presence.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“fissiparous multiplicity of faiths.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“Circulating libraries were denounced as purveyors of pornography and books of brain-rotting triviality.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“Here the owner’s intellect was stimulated not only by being surrounded by books, but other objects, including busts, vases, coins and a great variety of curiosities, especially antiquities”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“The most lavish book owned by the noble classes was also one of the most ubiquitous: the Book of Hours,”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“The flexibility of the compilation, the ability to create bespoke texts from segments of other works, was one of the key features distinguishing the manuscript book world from the age of print, where the order and nature of texts was established before they came into the hands of the purchaser. This loss of autonomy in the creation of books would be one of the major sources of regret among established collectors in the transition from manuscript to print in the fifteenth century.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“Mudie's insistence on the three-volume format was undoubtedly responsible for the verbosity of many nineteenth-century novels, as authors went to extraordinary efforts to pad their texts to the required length. While a seasoned professional like Anthony Trollope mastered the required skill, many struggled to maintain inspiration and dramatic tension for the required 200,000 words, 66,000 words per volume. If we wonder why so many nineteenth-century novels lose themselves in a convoluted (though chaste) love story between two marginal characters in the novel's middle passage, we should blame Charles Edward Mudie: this was the problem of the difficult second volume. If all else failed and authors acme in short, publishers resorted to larger typefaces and wide margins to disguise the deficit.”
― Arthur der Weduwen, The Library: A Fragile History

“Britain, where the establishment of a local library board required a taxpayer levy, the take-up rate was initially sluggish. Even when a library rate was proposed, hostile campaigning, often underwritten by the powerful brewers’ lobby, could ensure that it was defeated.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“public-spirited altruism that we should applaud – or is it a nostalgia for a world that has now disappeared and will never return? The educated and affluent part of our community takes it for granted that public funding of the arts and the facilitation of recreational reading is part of the core functions of government. But the public library – in the sense of a funded collection available free to anyone who wants to use it – has only existed since the mid nineteenth century, a mere fraction of the history of the library as a whole. If there is one lesson from the centuries-long story of the library, it is that libraries only last as long as people find them useful.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History