What Naudé did not discuss in his writings was the 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 most substantial legacy of Rome, none of whose libraries survived the fall of the western empire, was the gradual transition from papyrus scrolls to parchment books as the medium of storage. Parchment, made from animal skins, was a much more resilient surface, and it was on parchment that the learning of Rome lived out the next millennium in the monasteries of the Christian West.

The Ottoman Empire largely eschewed print altogether. The unhappy Venetian who presented to the Sublime Porte the first printed copy of the Qur’an was condemned for blasphemy. China, despite remarkable early experiments with woodblock printing, did not embrace metal type, for principally technical reasons. … But without the multiplying capacities of print, book collecting outside of Europe and European colonies remained largely an elite privilege.

This democratisation of luxury, making widely available what was once rare and precious, is a recurrent phenomenon in every era of human history, but it has often had painful consequences for book collecting. An aristocrat could hardly expect the same reception for their collection of 300 texts when the local cloth merchant had as many: better to buy a sculpture, a painting or a lion. Emperor Maximilian II sent his books off to the attic because they no longer featured in this lexicon of conspicuous display.

On the night of 31 May 1981, the library was razed to the ground by a Sinhalese crowd, one of the principal examples of ethnic biblioclasm of the twentieth century. … The entire collection of 1.5 million books and manuscripts was consumed in the resulting inferno.

For much of their long history, libraries were primarily an intellectual resource and a financial asset. Only the very rich could afford to treat their libraries as shiny toys with which to impress their friends, passers-by and, more incidentally, posterity.

For much of their long history, libraries were primarily an intellectual resource and a financial asset. Only the very rich could afford to treat their libraries as shiny toys with which to impress their friends, passers-by and, more incidentally, posterity.

The discovery of the papyrus plant, and its excellence as a writing medium, was an essential requirement for the translation of the emerging Greek culture from an oral to a written form: papyrus grew abundantly in the Nile delta, and the techniques of splitting the reed stalks and weaving them together as writing sheets were easily mastered. Papyrus became the pre-eminent writing medium of the ancient world, exported from Egypt to Greece and later Rome, and made possible the extraordinary experiment in knowledge acquisition that became the library at Alexandria.

By 338 bc, Athens was sufficiently concerned about the poor copies of plays in circulation that they established an official archive of authoritative texts.

The library of Alexandria was first and foremost a scholarly academy: the rapidly developing collection of texts was essentially their research archive. Scholars who agreed to join the community in Egypt received benefits few academics could even dream of: a lifetime appointment, with a handsome salary, exemption from tax and free food and lodging.

A collection of this magnitude necessarily required careful organisation. Scrolls were stored in recessed alcoves, where they could be stacked in organised groups. The sheer size of the Alexandrian library demanded far more systematic cataloguing, with books split between many different chambers. The texts were stored alphabetically, though presumably also organised by genre, the leading principle of classification in every institutional library thereafter. A feature of the Alexandrian library was the high quality of the scholars recruited as librarians. One, Callimachus of Cyrene, completed the first ever bibliographical dictionary of authors.

A collection of this magnitude necessarily required careful organisation. Scrolls were stored in recessed alcoves, where they could be stacked in organised groups. The sheer size of the Alexandrian library demanded far more systematic cataloguing, with books split between many different chambers. The texts were stored alphabetically, though presumably also organised by genre, the leading principle of classification in every institutional library thereafter. A feature of the Alexandrian library was the high quality of the scholars recruited as librarians. One, Callimachus of Cyrene, completed the first ever bibliographical dictionary of authors.

The major disadvantage of papyrus, otherwise an excellent medium for information storage, is its susceptibility to damp. Even in a well-curated collection, texts need to be recopied after a generation or two. The sheer size of the Alexandrian library militated against its survival. As with so many of the libraries we will meet in this book, neglect was a much more potent enemy than war or malice.

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.

With papyrus, one did not have the luxury of the age of paper or parchment, of allowing books to slumber unread on the shelves for centuries without the need for further curation.

In the centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, book production and book collecting took place largely within the domain of monastic communities … Many monasteries also played an important role in salvaging the remains of Roman culture by copying manuscripts containing the works of classical authors; indeed, this is how virtually all classical texts have come down to us today.

The transition from the papyrus scroll, the preferred medium of ancient writing, to the parchment codex, with separate pages sewn together (a book), would transform the library. … Yet parchment was not widely used in the ancient world, relied upon only during shortages of papyrus. In an era of abundant and cheap papyrus, this is understandable: parchment took longer to prepare and was far more expensive: a substantial parchment book would require the skins of more than a hundred calves, goats or sheep. But it did have two advantages: it was durable and would not degrade in climates colder than that of the Egyptian Nile delta, and one could write on both sides of the sheet, instead of the single side of papyrus.

The transition from the papyrus scroll, the preferred medium of ancient writing, to the parchment codex, with separate pages sewn together (a book), would transform the library. … Yet parchment was not widely used in the ancient world, relied upon only during shortages of papyrus. In an era of abundant and cheap papyrus, this is understandable: parchment took longer to prepare and was far more expensive: a substantial parchment book would require the skins of more than a hundred calves, goats or sheep. But it did have two advantages: it was durable and would not degrade in climates colder than that of the Egyptian Nile delta, and one could write on both sides of the sheet, instead of the single side of papyrus.

At some time in the third century, codices began to replace scrolls as the normative way to preserve a body of text; it was clear that this transformation was tied up with the Christian movement, whose early texts were almost universally produced as codices. By the sixth century, the codex was triumphant and remained the standard form of the book until the present day.

At some time in the third century, codices began to replace scrolls as the normative way to preserve a body of text; it was clear that this transformation was tied up with the Christian movement, whose early texts were almost universally produced as codices. By the sixth century, the codex was triumphant and remained the standard form of the book until the present day.

This naturally circumscribed the size of many monastic libraries, and, together with the sheer cost of parchment, helps explains why few medieval monasteries had libraries larger than 500 or 600 volumes. St Gallen possessed around 400 books in the late ninth century; Cluny, one of the richest monasteries in Europe around the twelfth century, had some 570 volumes. Before the thirteenth century, the norm for most monastic libraries was probably not much larger than around 100 or 200 books.

This naturally circumscribed the size of many monastic libraries, and, together with the sheer cost of parchment, helps explains why few medieval monasteries had libraries larger than 500 or 600 volumes. St Gallen possessed around 400 books in the late ninth century; Cluny, one of the richest monasteries in Europe around the twelfth century, had some 570 volumes. Before the thirteenth century, the norm for most monastic libraries was probably not much larger than around 100 or 200 books.

In the separate library rooms of the colleges, a profound shift took place: the scholars abandoned the sturdy storage of the monastic chest and moved towards libraries where scholars could work with the books. The new norm became a series of lecterns with benches for seating, placed in a row in the body of the room. … This was a critical development: books were now displayed openly rather than safely locked away in chests or cabinets. Readers could consult many texts in a short space of time, essential for the sort of textual work we associate with the advance of learning. But it also meant books could go missing with greater ease: by 1338, over 300 of the 2,000 volumes in the possession of the College of the Sorbonne had already disappeared.

The most successful book hunter of the period was a brilliant papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), who took his explorations for manuscripts beyond the Alps into the monastic heartlands of France, Germany and Switzerland. Here Bracciolini was responsible for the rediscovery of lost works of Lucretius, Cicero, Vitruvius, Quintilian and many other authors.

The pecia model allowed for a single text, generally a key textbook, to be reproduced simultaneously in parts. Whereas an entire book might take half a year to transcribe, stationers divided a text into standard quires, often eight pages long, which students could rent out for a short period of time.

The pecia system originated in Bologna in the early thirteenth century and was soon put into place at other universities throughout Europe.

The San Marco library would open with 400 volumes chained to the sixty-four reading benches. Access was restricted to literate male citizens of the city with scholarly interests, but this may have encompassed up to 1,000 men in fifteenth-century Florence.

Chinese and later Arab society contributed a crucial innovation to the development of the library with the art of making paper. In East Asia, sheets of paper were made from plant fibres, like bamboo, and used for both scrolls and codices. This technology spread during the first millennia to the Islamic world, where textile rags became the common resource with which to produce paper. The manufacture of paper was far cheaper and more efficient than the production of parchment from animal skins: all that paper-mills required were a steady supply of linen, cotton or hemp rags and a source of running water to power the hammers that reduced the rags to pulp.

Chinese and later Arab society contributed a crucial innovation to the development of the library with the art of making paper. In East Asia, sheets of paper were made from plant fibres, like bamboo, and used for both scrolls and codices. This technology spread during the first millennia to the Islamic world, where textile rags became the common resource with which to produce paper. The manufacture of paper was far cheaper and more efficient than the production of parchment from animal skins: all that paper-mills required were a steady supply of linen, cotton or hemp rags and a source of running water to power the hammers that reduced the rags to pulp.

Chinese and later Arab society contributed a crucial innovation to the development of the library with the art of making paper. In East Asia, sheets of paper were made from plant fibres, like bamboo, and used for both scrolls and codices. This technology spread during the first millennia to the Islamic world, where textile rags became the common resource with which to produce paper. The manufacture of paper was far cheaper and more efficient than the production of parchment from animal skins: all that paper-mills required were a steady supply of linen, cotton or hemp rags and a source of running water to power the hammers that reduced the rags to pulp.

Chinese and later Arab society contributed a crucial innovation to the development of the library with the art of making paper. In East Asia, sheets of paper were made from plant fibres, like bamboo, and used for both scrolls and codices. This technology spread during the first millennia to the Islamic world, where textile rags became the common resource with which to produce paper. The manufacture of paper was far cheaper and more efficient than the production of parchment from animal skins: all that paper-mills required were a steady supply of linen, cotton or hemp rags and a source of running water to power the hammers that reduced the rags to pulp.

The production of manuscript books increased in volume for at least two decades after the invention of printing in the middle of the 1450s. The birth of print did not cause the collapse of manuscript culture; manuscript writings, in many forms, would continue to play a major part in the work of government, in the provision of news and in the literary world, for many centuries.

The production of manuscript books increased in volume for at least two decades after the invention of printing in the middle of the 1450s. The birth of print did not cause the collapse of manuscript culture; manuscript writings, in many forms, would continue to play a major part in the work of government, in the provision of news and in the literary world, for many centuries.

Yet a press did not churn out copies of a book on a daily basis: crucially, printing was done by the sheet. After setting up the metal type in a frame, the printer would print a certain number of copies of one sheet; then the frame would be broken up, the type washed, and re-set for the next sheet, and so on. A book could thus be on the press for six months, and the printer would not have a single product to sell, given that the book was never ready until the final sheet had been printed.

The printer, although he may have had a few customers in mind, had to speculate how many buyers might be found for 300, 500 or 1,000 copies, and where those buyers might be. Several hundred buyers would rarely be found in the same city: the market for a substantial Latin edition might well be dispersed around Europe. Underestimating demand would rob the printer of additional profit; overestimating demand was financially lethal, as investment had been sunk into unsaleable printed sheets.

The printer, although he may have had a few customers in mind, had to speculate how many buyers might be found for 300, 500 or 1,000 copies, and where those buyers might be. Several hundred buyers would rarely be found in the same city: the market for a substantial Latin edition might well be dispersed around Europe. Underestimating demand would rob the printer of additional profit; overestimating demand was financially lethal, as investment had been sunk into unsaleable printed sheets.

Prices had also been driven down because paper rather than parchment had now become the preferred medium of book production. This transformation was one borne of necessity, as the supply of parchment could never feed the insatiable demand of the presses. The thirty copies of the Gutenberg Bible printed on parchment required the skins of at least 5,000 calves.

Prices had also been driven down because paper rather than parchment had now become the preferred medium of book production. This transformation was one borne of necessity, as the supply of parchment could never feed the insatiable demand of the presses. The thirty copies of the Gutenberg Bible printed on parchment required the skins of at least 5,000 calves.

While the invention of printing heralded a new age for the library, filled with possibilities, it also condemned to obscurity and neglect the collections of an era left behind. It would take the best part of a hundred years before the comparative rarity of manuscript books would make them once more treasured objects of desire.

That a collection of 2,000 books could be assembled in an undistinguished German monastery is remarkable in itself

Most collectors at that time would still follow the principle established by medieval libraries, and canonised by the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogues, of ranging books according to their scholarly faculties. Theology would be placed first, then jurisprudence and medicine, with literature, philosophy and science normally consigned to a compendious miscellaneous category. This would remain the predominant mode of organising books and catalogues into the eighteenth century

In addition to the Abecedarium, Colon found time for a separate cataloguing enterprise, offering a detailed note on each of his purchases, including where it was printed, where he had bought it and how much he paid. This detailed record allows us a view of the workings of the international book market of unprecedented subtlety.

At least in the age of print, no failure was ever final. Libraries abandoned or dispersed, burned down or looted, could be regenerated with astonishing speed. That was the miracle of print: the ever-accumulating mountain of books was available, sometimes at knockdown prices, for anyone with the energy and determination to build libraries.

For the next two hundred years, the fate of the library would lie in the hands of generations of scholars, civil servants, lawyers, physicians and merchants, who collected books for work, and increasingly for pleasure. This was the age of the professionals; and it was they who would shape the future of the library.

The former monk was a pioneer of the printing press: Luther appealed directly to a broad public by writing short pamphlets, in the vernacular German tongue, that addressed crucial issues of theology succinctly.

The Reformation gradually changed the nature of the book: it became cheaper, shorter and less scholarly. This transformation encouraged many people who were not habitual buyers of books to build their own collections.

The deliberate destruction of archival documents helps explain why the peasant bands also targeted the much smaller personal libraries of noblemen, or abbots and bishops, which contained many legal papers.

Around 1600, the university was still selling off vellum manuscripts from monastic libraries, but the regents instructed their librarian to cut out random leaves, and jumble others together, so that if the manuscripts ended up back in Catholic hands, they would no longer be of much use.

The dissolution of the monasteries instigated the largest transfer of land in England since the Norman Conquest of 1066.

The dissolution of the monasteries instigated the largest transfer of land in England since the Norman Conquest of 1066.

The dissolution of the monasteries instigated the largest transfer of land in England since the Norman Conquest of 1066.

A great number of those who purchased those superstitious mansions [monastic properties], reserved of those library books, some to serve their jakes [lavatories], some to scour their candlesticks, and some to rub their boots. Some they sold to the grocers and soap-sellers, and some they sent overseas to the bookbinders, not in small number, but at times whole ships full, to the wonderment of foreign nations.

The first Roman index also included a category of heretical printers, sixty-one in all, whose entire output, regardless of content, was suspect. Good Christians were supposed to surrender copies of these books from their libraries, while the production, sale and ownership of all texts listed in the index was strictly forbidden.

This transformation owed a great deal to a remarkable innovation in the book market, almost as significant for the development of libraries as printing itself: the book auction. … Booksellers assessed collections, compiled the catalogues and sold them in their shops, taking 5–15 per cent commission on sales. They even, less creditably, infiltrated some of their own slow-moving stock into the sale, where it could be passed off as part of the distinguished library going under the hammer.

Books seem to have held their value remarkably well, and often sold for much the same prices for which they were purchased twenty or thirty years before. … Books were a necessary part of professional lives; they could also be seen as prudent pension planning.

A recent investigation of some 450 ministerial collections sold at auction in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic finds an average size of 1,144 books.

It is only thanks to the printed auction catalogues that so many collections can now be reconstructed; collections, it must be said, much more heavily used than the inherited library of many a noble house. … Yet what these printed catalogues, themselves often extremely rare, reveal to us is a critical moment in the history of collecting, when private individuals of less than extraordinary wealth assembled libraries that were bigger than many of the institutional collections of their day.

By June 1600 the hall was fitted out with oak bookcases with integral reading desks. On 8 November 1602, the library was inaugurated with a collection of over 2,000 volumes. By 1605, when the first published catalogue of the collection appeared, it had 5,600 volumes; fifteen years later the collection had quadrupled in size, to 23,000.

Bodley, it seemed, had learned the lessons from the failures of earlier collectors: he ensured that his library would be provided with a substantial endowment, of land and property rents, to acquire books. This was key if the library was to remain supplied with the latest scholarly publications; he was rightly convinced that it was the absence of this provision that had caused so many ambitious library projects to atrophy.

The subjugation of such an advanced society required a systematic destruction of its books and archives, partly to demoralise a potentially potent military foe, but also to eradicate the worship of what the Spanish identified as false gods. Poring over these multicoloured scrolls of deerskin or screenfold panoramas inscribed on tree bark, Spanish suspicions were exacerbated by the fact that Aztec writing used a pictographic system, easily denounced as witchcraft. Only the Mayans had a recognisably alphabetical system of writing.

By the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Brazil in 1759, their Brazilian libraries collectively owned 60,000 books, with Salvador da Bahia the largest library owning 15,000 items. The suppression of the order dealt a devastating blow to the Brazilian educational system, and indeed to that of Spanish Peru, where the Jesuits were also active.

The Pilgrims brought with them an extraordinary quantity of books, stocks that were gradually replenished by relief ships and trading vessels over the following years. At the death of their owners the books were inventoried along with other possessions, so that they could be recycled to new owners in the community. … Chief among them was the library of William Brewster, one of the leaders of the community in Leiden and again in Plymouth. The 350 books listed on his death in 1644 included staples of Latin Protestant learning: Calvin, Beza and the Latin Bible of Tremellius and Junius.

The Pilgrims brought with them an extraordinary quantity of books, stocks that were gradually replenished by relief ships and trading vessels over the following years. At the death of their owners the books were inventoried along with other possessions, so that they could be recycled to new owners in the community. … Chief among them was the library of William Brewster, one of the leaders of the community in Leiden and again in Plymouth. The 350 books listed on his death in 1644 included staples of Latin Protestant learning: Calvin, Beza and the Latin Bible of Tremellius and Junius.

Thanks to the ever-increasing rate of publishing throughout Europe, the destruction of a library was decreasingly potent as a weapon, since library collections could be rebuilt so much more easily.

What we learn most from this story of conflict, confrontation and purposeful construction was that the people of Europe recognised books for the incendiary objects they were: beacons of faith or pollutants of the body politic. Yet we also learn, from the eager appropriation of Jesuit books for Protestant libraries, and vice versa, how much of the cultural capital of the era was held in common. Intellectuals of all faiths valued the classics, the Church Fathers, the grammars and dictionaries that supplied the most substantial tomes in any collection. That was why the victors would rather work their way round the shelves of a conquered library than pick through the ashes.

Since they frequently consisted of texts from the abolished Catholic monasteries, it was difficult to justify the expense of curating a collection of hundreds or thousands of old books, mostly in Latin, for a non-existent public.

The town library of Zutphen, in the east of the country, was first opened in the 1560s, shortly before the outbreak of the conflict. It was plundered five times between 1572 and 1591, and its collection declined from 357 works to barely a hundred. The desperate librarian at one point tried to cement up the door of the library, but he found that this was no serious obstacle to soldiers on a quest for the gilded clasps that adorned the bindings in the collection.

For the same price of the Oceanus Juris, some 300 vernacular works could have been purchased for the library, which would certainly have appealed to a larger proportion of the community. Instead, the municipal libraries of the Netherlands remained sources of civic pride, unused but admired.

All the books bought were marked with a printed label naming the donor.

Kirkwood argued that a good local library would have a moral function, encouraging men to spend less time gambling and drinking, and more time reading.

After two years of frantic travel, through France, Switzerland, Germany, England and the Netherlands, Naudé had furnished the cardinal with a library of breathtaking size – estimated at 40,000 printed books and 850 volumes of manuscripts.

In 1627, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the favourite nephew of Urban VIII, attracted Lucas Holste, a peripatetic German scholar and gifted linguist, as his librarian.19 With virtually unlimited financial resources at his disposal, Holste created a library that would almost rival the first Mazarine library in size. … On one trip, the Pope issued an edict to the Neapolitan Franciscans which forbade them to sell any books from their collections unless they first offered them to Francesco Barberini and his librarian.

Libraries throughout Europe abandoned the basic fittings of the medieval college and church libraries, dominated by reading lecterns and low central bookcases. Instead they remodelled library rooms to resemble great halls, in which books were placed, spines out, in great vertical bookcases along the walls.

The baroque library was a visual delight, but one that sacrificed study space for beauty, and relegated books to the same function as lavish wallpaper. The ordinary needs of readers – desks or lecterns for study – were sacrificed to accommodate marvellous objects that epitomised the wonders of inquiry.

As books circled up the social hierarchy, multiplying along the way, a road was paved towards the foundation of the first national libraries.

What seems extraordinary to us was that many of these books were incunabula, books from the first age of print, the fifteenth century. The Dominican convent at Frankfurt had flourished precisely around the time that printing was invented in nearby Mainz, so the library had over 1,000 incunabula, many of them printed on parchment. Today, these books would be sold for phenomenal prices. To the Dominicans they were worth no more than the reuse value of the parchment.

In the space of a hundred years, the sale of early printed books had become part of a sophisticated antiquarian market.

The distinction of a fine library depended increasingly on books that were precious because of their illustrations, their date of publication, their binding, or even their printer.

The greatest irony was that these antiquarian books, in their content, often espoused precisely those philosophies that the intellectual revolutionaries of the period had sought to overthrow. This irony was lost, however, on the bookbrokers, auctioneers, opportunistic librarians and rich collectors who had commodified these books, and now dictated their price.

Only 13 per cent of the early New England libraries were still in business fifty years after their foundation.

Yet if we scrutinise the catalogues published by circulating libraries, fiction accounts for a surprisingly small proportion of the stock.

Circulating libraries declined after the end of the American Civil War, destroyed not by the advance of public libraries, but by the drop in book prices which made ownership more attractive than borrowing for their core middle-class clientele.

Furnishing these new works to customers unwilling to wait a year for a 6-shilling reprint became the staple of the circulating libraries, which by the 1840s could charge 4 to 6 guineas for an annual subscription.

Readers got for their guinea-a-year as many books as they could read for less than the price of one new novel, and publishers secured a guaranteed sale, since Mudie would take the bulk of the first edition. An edition of 500 copies could secure for the publisher a decent profit, and Mudie would order 1,500 of an established author. … In effect, Mudie had secured himself a national monopoly on the publication of new fiction. What he chose not to take would not be published.

Readers got for their guinea-a-year as many books as they could read for less than the price of one new novel, and publishers secured a guaranteed sale, since Mudie would take the bulk of the first edition. An edition of 500 copies could secure for the publisher a decent profit, and Mudie would order 1,500 of an established author. … In effect, Mudie had secured himself a national monopoly on the publication of new fiction. What he chose not to take would not be published.

Readers got for their guinea-a-year as many books as they could read for less than the price of one new novel, and publishers secured a guaranteed sale, since Mudie would take the bulk of the first edition. An edition of 500 copies could secure for the publisher a decent profit, and Mudie would order 1,500 of an established author. … In effect, Mudie had secured himself a national monopoly on the publication of new fiction. What he chose not to take would not be published.

Between the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British crown and the Māori chiefs of the North Island in 1840 and 1914, New Zealand’s settler population expanded from a few thousand to just over 1 million. In the same period, 769 libraries were founded in the colony. In 1878, there was one library for every 1,529 people. Virtually all these foundations followed the model of the subscription library, much preferred in nineteenth-century colonial society, as it encouraged personal collections to be pooled for communal benefit.

In the Dutch East Indies, on the other hand, the colonial government was an active sponsor of libraries, and created no fewer than 2,500 public libraries between 1918 and 1926, stocked with literature in the vernacular languages specifically designed for the Malay, Javanese and Sundanese populations. These proved exceptionally popular and facilitated real strides in the advance of literacy. To the Dutch colonial government, they were a tool to inculcate support for colonial rule and western values; in this they were only partially successful, given that the indigenous populations, once exposed to western notions of liberty, self-determination and democracy, were determined to apply these principles to themselves.

British troops in India were the first in the world to be provided with permanent libraries, some two decades before their colleagues in Britain received the same. By the 1820s, every European regiment in India had the benefit of the services of a schoolmaster, a reading master and writing master, two assistant schoolmasters, a librarian and a schoolmistress for children.

The value of books exported from Britain to India rose dramatically between 1791 and 1810, from £8,725 to £66,180; by the early 1860s this had grown to £313,772.

In 1886, Macmillan launched their Colonial Library, a series of titles that were only allowed to be sold in the British market overseas. Within thirty years, the Colonial Library, dressed in a recognisable livery of uniform bindings, comprised 680 titles, of which 632 were fiction.

It also soon became clear that the dominant themes in English realist fiction did not appeal in India, the largest colonial market, as they did not reflect the realities of Indian readers. Instead these readers favoured fiction that emphasised themes like moral virtue, struggle, oppression and liberation; most strikingly the novels of George W. M. Reynolds, many of which centred around social injustice in nineteenth-century London.

It was the first collection of its sort to be conceived as a national resource, and one that was regarded by its readers and visitors as the embodiment of the confidence, prestige and ambition of the British people. Libraries had long been seen as symbols of cultural distinction, but that this concept could be tied directly to the nation state was a particular nineteenth-century development.

The Folgers accumulated 1,400 different copies of the collected works of Shakespeare, including 200 from the seventeenth century. Eighty-two of these were copies of the famous First Folio (1623), some of them previously owned by kings, queens and illustrious individuals such as Samuel Johnson and William Pitt. Ironically, the First Folio is not a very rare book: over 200 copies are still in existence today. Yet the fact that Folger was able to acquire more than a third of those was exceptional.

The honour of establishing the first truly public library, funded by local taxation with free access to its citizens, is generally assigned to the small New Hampshire town of Peterborough, which chose in 1833 to divert a sum provided for the development of local schools to the creation of a library.

In the course of discussions with the civic elders, Carnegie offered another £5,000, so long as the city would adopt the Library Act – that is, levy a tax rate to support a new library. The council readily agreed, and in 1884 Dunfermline opened the first of what would become 3,000 Carnegie libraries.

In the United States, the sudden proliferation of libraries in small communities saw a wave of appointments of female librarians. At the outbreak of the First World War, 85 per cent of the staff employed in American libraries were women, whereas in England the proportions were exactly reversed.

In 1934, Germany had 9,494 libraries. By 1940, that number had risen to 13,236.

What in peacetime represented the normal commerce of scientific exchange now became closely guarded state secrets.

Libraries were never just the innocent victims of war: they were themselves weaponised. At a time of total war, their role became more important than ever.

On the night of 24 August 1870, all three libraries were completely destroyed by incendiary bombs fired by German artillery.

This was an entirely German library, a tangible seal of their claim of right to Strasbourg. This re-Germanisation programme was largely successful: by 1918 only a quarter of the population of Alsace could read French. This stimulated an equally determined campaign after 1918 to render Alsace francophone, initiated with the creation of 800 new French-language libraries. By 1927, this Oeuvre du Livre Français had supplied 200,000 books to 2,275 libraries. … Such library politics in the service of state building was the inevitable fate of a contested border zone.

In the context of the times, faced with the apparent invincibility of German armies, this was just enough. The valour of the aircrews, famously saluted by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, was presented to a grateful nation in a timely pamphlet account of the Battle of Britain. The hunger for good news ensured that this would be a runaway bestseller. The initial print run of 50,000 sold out in a few hours; 300,000 extra copies were quickly ordered. An illustrated version, with action photographs and explanatory diagrams, sold 700,000 copies. By April 1942, The Battle of Britain, August–October 1940 had been published in forty-three editions in twenty-four languages and serialised in newspapers around the globe.

The first strand was the wholesale destruction of the entire written record of groups singled out for obliteration: this assault on culture, to wipe memory from the face of the earth, has been described as libricide, the genocide of books. Second, in paradoxical opposition to this policy, was the systematic collecting in Nazi Germany of huge collections of the books of enemy ideologies, so that even in the perennial rule of National Socialism, these evils – Bolshevism, Socialism, Judaism, Freemasonry – could be studied.

Both the Berlin state library and Freiburg University obtained considerable quantities of books from France: French scholars reckon the total loss of book stock as being between 10 and 20 million volumes.

Yet even now, times were changing; and in the next fifty years, for the first time since Gutenberg, cultural commentators began to doubt whether books could hold their own. … The twentieth century, it soon became clear, would be different. From the first days of radio and then cinema these were real competitors, not just for much-valued leisure time, but also for possession of the imaginative world once shaped primarily by print.

In 1924, the purchase of radios accounted for a third of American spending on furniture: in 1934, Americans owned 42 per cent of all the radios in the world.

For those to whom books played an important recreational role, the radio was initially disorientating in its offer of a prescribed schedule of entertainment. Against the versatility of opening a book in odd moments of leisure, radio output could only be caught at the appointed hour; and if concentration wavered, there was no turning back a few pages to recap.

As the public library movement celebrated its first century, the library reading rooms were already beginning their evolution from an essential institution for the promotion of learning and civilising values, to a branch of the social services.

The first Texas bookmobile, in 1930, carried about 1,400 volumes; the New Deal WPA project provided another thirty-three bookmobiles. … Ironically, it was Cold War anxieties of Soviet technological superiority that spurred a concerted effort to improve library provision in rural areas through the Library Services Act of 1956.

At its zenith, libraries would be attached to around 460 of their branches. In the 1950s, Boots issued approximately 50 million books a year to its members, for whom subscriptions started at 10s 6d a year.

The romance would eventually emerge triumphant as libraries realised they need the readers of romances as much as the readers need the libraries.

On the night of Sunday 8 October 1871, a fire began in Chicago that would change the face of the city. … The fire, which raged unchecked through all of Monday, swept all of this away, along with 17,450 homes, rendering 95,000 people homeless. Almost incidental to this enormous human suffering were the losses to the libraries: contemporary estimates, incorporating fifty fine private libraries, suggested losses of up to 3 million volumes, and this may be conservative.

English efforts focused on the creation of a new free public library for Chicago, something which to this point had been lacking.

When prosecution counsel invited the jury to consider whether this was a book they would wish their wives and servants to read, the game was up: the defence of the book was now a defence of modern Britain. Penguin was acquitted and within a month had an edition of 200,000 copies on the street.

Horton recommended that central government should bear more of the burden, but in return, libraries should become real community hubs, with a range of responsibilities, recreational, informational and advisory. … If this sounds eerily familiar, it is because Horton had identified, back in 1976, exactly the crisis of purpose that we associate with the digital age.

With the Old Main needing to be emptied so that it could be repurposed as a museum, 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.

Most of all, by empowering the digital revolution, librarians have given up the one unique selling point which they defended so tenaciously for almost as long as we have had libraries: the right to apply their knowledge, taste and discrimination to assisting the choice of their patrons.

Libraries are slow-thinking spaces away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Take out the books and it is hard to see what marks these institutions out from other public community spaces or government offices. They would soon lose much of their clientele. For books have one key characteristic that differentiates these users from any of the other groups who meet in library space. Anyone who wishes may join the community of book readers at any point in their lives, and they may equally leave or suspend their membership (a characteristic libraries share with organised religion).

It is randomness that marks out the library from other public shared space; and the search for something uplifting, whatever it may be.

In the first century of the public library, from the 1880s onwards, this was very different. Those who entered the library did share one vital characteristic, in that they were by and large aspirational: the library was an instrument of social or personal improvement.

The book, the artefact, has proved exceptionally resilient through the centuries: surviving the collapse of the Roman Empire, the media change from manuscript to print, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, carpet bombing and numerous attempts to limit access to unacceptable texts. Most recently it has seen off many of the technological pall-bearers sent to conduct it to the crematorium: microfilm, the CD-ROM, and now the e-reader. The sheer tangibility of the book is a key element of its success, and its versatility: as manual, totem, encyclopaedia and source of entertainment.

In the Roman Empire, libraries often functioned as monuments that celebrated the achievements of their founder and their family. In this, the library was just another means with which to bolster a political reputation.

In this portrait of Duke Federico of Urbino and his son Guidobaldo (c.1475), the duke has his attention fixed on one of the valuable manuscripts from his collection, while decked out in martial finery. Having spent a fortune on his library, the collection would be a sad ruin a century after his death.

Although his life revolved around books, Erasmus was remarkably nonchalant when it came to assembling a library. For Erasmus, access to texts was far more important than owning them.

The expansion of the book trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the pleasures of book ownership to many more people, as bookshops and itinerant pedlars proliferated around the European continent.

The university library of Göttingen, one of the largest institutional libraries in eighteenth-century Europe. The space for conversation makes clear that libraries continued to be places of social interaction as much as study: perhaps another reason why one Göttingen professor suggested that a university library was not so necessary a service after all.

The interior of the library of the monastery of San Francisco in Lima, Peru, founded in 1673. In Spanish South America, dominated by the Catholic orders, monasteries fulfilled a prominent role as centres of education, research and book collecting.

Above all, the redesigned monastic libraries of Germany, Austria and Bohemia were laid out to impress their visitors and made little provision for desks where the books might be consulted.

With the rise of antiquarian tastes, the book auction was easily mocked as a place where bibliophiles squandered their fortunes.

Under the Third Reich, the holdings of public libraries were completely given over to propagandistic literature of this type.

Librarians only reconciled themselves to supplying such books to their readers when it became necessary to justify continued funding.

When architectural visions clash with the demands of library users, architecture often wins: the atrium of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, pictured in 2009, some fifteen years after hundreds of thousands of books were removed without consultation.