February 1, 2018
A bright, idiosyncratic tour of a book historian's collected knowledge about libraries and bibliophilia.More miscellany than catalog, the book assembles snippets from a wide variety of disciplines into an eclectic history of libraries as cultural, political, aesthetic, literary, mnemonic, and, above all, personal phenomena dedicated to collecting and preserving the written word. Australian book industry historian Kells (Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution, 2015, etc.), an expert on rare books, invokes recognizable figures such as Borges and Tolkien as patron saints of the library, but he also spotlights less familiar libraries and librarians from the dawn of writing to the information age, with thematic interludes for all the strange, obsessive things people have done with books besides reading them. The author leads us through this labyrinthine account by his own associative logic rather than following a systematic design; paragraphs jump from one millennium to another and back again, while lists of names and dates exhilarate and disorient in equal measure, running headlong through the stacks of the world's great collections. Kells leaves the modern library to other writers to chronicle and analyze, bypassing current and future threats to global archives and ignoring the rise of the hip librarian. In adapting academic subject matter for a mainstream audience, the author risks boring general readers with an accumulation of arcana and irritating scholarly readers by omitting the sources and depth of coverage that characterize a reputable book history. Still, the narrative merits attention for the way it enlivens dense summaries on printing, the book trade, collecting, library design, and bibliography with tales of the disasters, discoveries, and notable book lunatics that populate library lore.Readers familiar with St. Gall, Poggio, Count Libri, and other such significant figures in the history of manuscripts may look to more specialist accounts, but budding book enthusiasts will find this an engaging bedside read.
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February 12, 2018
Book-trade historian Kells (Penguin and the Lane Brothers) blends scholarly expertise with sharp wit in this enjoyable history of libraries. From the ancient oral libraries of the Arrente people of Australia to the digitized collections of today, Kells consistently proves that “libraries are full of stories.” He takes the reader inside some of the most famous libraries in the world, such as the Vatican Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In addition to exposing a trove of secret doors, hidden staircases, and disappearing ladders tucked away in these libraries, Kells unmasks centuries-old tales of crimes (stolen books, modified dust jackets, spurious blurbs), forgeries (like the corset at the Folger Library once believed to have belonged to Queen Elizabeth I), and spicy tales of erotica (the Russian State Library stockpiled thousands of erotic works in storage during the Cold War). He enriches this cultural history by linking the evolution of libraries to the history of book design and the expansion of literacy among social classes. Kells’s passion for this subject suffuses this pleasurable book, calling readers to understand the importance of the library’s role preserving humanity’s history and why libraries are still relevant today.
Starred review from January 1, 2018
Libraries massively predate books, Kells asserts, if one defines a library as an organized collection of texts. He's thinking of the oral tradition: Warehoused as memories, legends, myths, prayers, parables, and poems were preserved and shared for generations. But as intriguing as this line of inquiry isleading Kells, an Australian historian of the book and a rare-book collector, to a stinging recounting of outsiders' attempts to understand the first Australians' Dreaming stories it is the physical book that delights and occupies himall the ways books have been made, amassed, sheltered, and accessed. In this free-roaming history of libraries, Kells, well read, well traveled, ebullient, and erudite, relishes tales of innovation, obsession, and criminality. Kells' scintillating, often irreverent catalog of wonders and bibliomaniacs begins with a reluctant cataloger, the future library director and renowned writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose tedious work at a municipal library in Buenos Aires inspired his indelible and disquieting short story, The Library of Babel. Kells will return to Borges after he tells the full story of the clay tablet, papyrus scroll, vellum and parchment codex, and printed books on paper, each technological advance paralleled by the evolution of library organization, design, and construction, including the development of the bookshelf and bindings that allowed books to stand upright. As soon as there were books, there were forgeries and thefts, yielding saucy bits of history. The rapid and constant proliferation of books means that libraries have their own Moore's law, Kells observes, necessitating structural and logistical evolution. As books multiplied, so did threats to libraries, from fires and floods to war and political change, not to mention the perpetual onslaught of voracious, book-eating insects. Kells, who will please readers of his fellow bibliophiles Alberto Manguel and Nicholas Basbanes, tells tales of the best and worst librarians in history, and outs library secrets, including the use of fake books, which he was pleased to see on a supersized scale at the Kansas City Public Library's splendid downtown branch. Kells also tracks the presence of libraries in literature, citing Hobbit libraries in Tolkien and Audrey Niffenegger's beautifully haunting illustrated novel, The Night Bookmobile (2010), among others. As Kells ponders the role of libraries now, he returns to Borges' vision of an infinite library, a prescient metaphor for the internet, which has created an even greater need for librarians and libraries and their arts of selection and curation. Much more than accumulations of books, writes Kells, the best libraries are hotspots and organs of civilizations; they are also places of solace and education, sources of nourishment for the human spirit, cultural staging posts in which new arrivals can be inducted into their adopted countries. Kells' revelatory romp through the centuries cues us to the fact that, as has so often been the case, libraries need our passionate attention and support, our advocacy, gratitude, and (given Kells' tales of book-kissing, including Coleridge pressing his lips to his copy of Spinoza) love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)