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"Engrossingly saturated with fascinating lore, colorful anecdotes and deft portraits." -- Hilarie M. Sheets, New York Times Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Now they are in crisis. Former rare books librarian and Harvard MetaLAB visionary Matthew Battles takes us from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries and on to the Information Age, to explore how libraries are built and how they are destroyed: from the scroll burnings in ancient China to the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia to the latest revolutionary upheavals of the digital age. A new epilogue elucidates the preservation of knowledge amid the creative destruction of twenty-first century technology.



About the Author

Matthew Battles

As a twelve year old, Matthew Battles accidentally threw a baseball through the window of the public library in Petersburg, Illinois; he's been paying for it ever since. His first book, Library: An Unquiet History, appeared in 2004. He has written about language, culture, nature, technology, and history for the American Scholar, the Atlantic Online, the Boston Globe, and the Wilson Quarterly, among other publications. He is editor and lead writer at Gearfuse.com, a blog covering science, technology, and culture. He also blogs at HiLobrow.com, and is at work on a book about the sentimental and natural history of handwriting. On Twitter, he's @matthewbattles.



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