[Marginalia] When they come for your libraries . . .
This post will not be as dark as the image above probably implies, I promise. It’s a message of hope and a call to action.
I’m writing in the middle of National Library Week, with Drop Everything and Read day (D.E.A.R.) coming on Saturday, so we have much to celebrate!
The image will make sense by the end.
Hunters and gatherers
Recently — and beautifully — translated into English, the book Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, opens with a story about “mysterious bands of horsemen” on the roads of ancient Greece,
“hunters in search of a special kind of prey. A prey that is silent, cunning, and vanishes without a trace.”
The hunters are described as being wary of the dangers in their travels from rebels, mercenaries, thieves, contagious diseases, shipwrecks, and more, because,
“The king of Egypt has entrusted great sums of money to them before sending them to carry out his orders across the sea.”
What were these imagined hunters seeking?
“Books. They were searching for books.”
Author Irene Vallejo thus begins her sprawling exploration of the origins and history of books somewhere in the middle, with the audacious ambitions of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt to gather in their Great Library in Alexandria “all the books in the world.”
What makes books so valuable?
Vallejo ties the invention of books to papyrus and the Egyptian discovery in the third millennium BC that its reeds could be sliced thin, layered at a right angle, and beaten with mallets to release sap that glued the layers into durable sheets. The sheets were polished smooth and then glued together into long strips that could be rolled up as scrolls, usually 10-12 feet long (though the longest we know of was 42 meters, or around 138 feet in length). The seams were also polished so they would not catch the tips of the scribe’s pen. After describing this manufacturing process, she asserts:
“The first book was born when the words — as ethereal as air — found refuge in the pith of an aquatic plant.”
Previously, writing was done on stone, clay tablets, wood, or metal. It was used primarily for keeping business records. But with papyrus scrolls, humans had a format that was light-weight, flexible, and above all, portable — thus, as I jotted in the margin,
“Books: ready for journey and adventure.”
Some 1,500 or so years later, the value of books might be summed up in the story told of how Alexander the Great, after capturing the Persian king Darius, found a magnificent treasure chest among the spoils. Plutarch tells us that Alexander asked his men what valuable object should be stored in it?
After hearing their suggestions of money, jewels, essences, spices, and the like, Alexander ordered instead that his copy of The Iliad be put inside the chest to be carried with him on their campaigns. I wrote in the margin there:
“a book: the greatest treasure”
Vallejo quotes Socrates as saying that the Egyptian god Theuth, who was believed to have given us letters, called written words “the elixir of memory and wisdom.” I wrote in the margin just after that,
“books: tools to free knowledge from time and death”
And Vallejo also quotes Jorge Luis Borges with:
“Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book.”
After listing various other inventions as “extensions of his body” (physical or the senses), Borges explains his claim for books being “the most wondrous” with:
“But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.”
[Want more quotes about the value of books? Visit my previous posts, 27 Quotes on Books, Reading, Writing, Learning, and Doing and [TfTi] 30 more quotes on books to inspire writers and readers.]
Libraries: places to store and protect the treasure of books
Alexander’s treatment of his treasured copy of The Iliad seems typical of how rulers and wealthy folk regarded books, almost since longer writings on papyrus scrolls began to be copied to make them available to multiple owners. Inventories of books have been found showing the existence of libraries by around 2500 BC.
These were private libraries for the use of those with wealth and power, in part to show off both. By the 7th century BC, a Syrian monarch boasted that not only had he established the library at Nineveh for his own “royal contemplation and reading,” but unlike any of his predecessors, he’d learned the art of writing, as well.
But three centuries later, perhaps as a side-effect of Alexander’s obsession with ruling the entire world, libraries were about to change from private, personal, localized preserves of the wealthy. Just as Alexander considered the whole world his, quoting Plutarch again, Vallejo tells us that “he commanded that all [people in the vast regions he conquered] should consider the world their homeland.”
In one spectacular display of his conscious effort to merge his Greek-Macedonian followers with his new subjects, in 324 BC, after taking the Persian city of Susa, he threw a five-day celebration that included weddings for himself and eighty of his generals and relatives to women of the Persian aristocracy. In addition, he provided dowries to fund the marriages of 10,000 of his soldiers to Eastern women. (The Macedonian culture allowed polygamy.)
One of the generals, named Ptolemy, married the daughter of a provincial governor that day. When Alexander died of a fever (or possibly poison) the following year, Ptolemy took his troops to Egypt, installed himself as ruler, and set about building a new city at the mouth of the Nile, naming it Alexandria, in honor of his fallen leader.
Vallejo speculates that the idea for the Great Library came from Alexander himself. If so, Ptolemy may have been both honoring that legacy and claiming further legitimacy for his own lineage by carrying out Alexander’s vision. In Vallejo’s words,
“Bringing together all existing books is another … way of possessing the world.”
We don’t know precisely when the Library took shape as a physical space containing the beginnings of its collection of scrolls, likely during the reign of Ptolemy I (323-283 BC) or his son, Ptolemy II (283-246 BC). Nor even whether it was a separate place that we would recognize as a library.
There are indications that it was simply part of the Musaeum built as housing and working spaces for the scholars invited to live there — with generous salaries and tax-free! The term library may have been understood as the scrolls themselves, which were stored in nooks, alcoves, and shelving throughout the Musaeum.
In many ways, Vallejo’s descriptions of this new institution remind me of a modern major university. She names an all-star roster of researchers, scientists, mathematicians, and writers working and debating among themselves. Meanwhile, librarians — a position invented by the first person brought in to manage the collection, Demetrius of Phalerum — were cataloging (another innovation of Alexandria) and growing the collection. And an army of scribes were making copies and translations — akin to a modern university press.
The Great Library and its librarians invented the first cataloging systems, the first use of alphabetical classifications, and the use of trained staff to find and deliver a specific scroll to the scholars when requested, from among the tens of thousands those hunters kept delivering and the scribes kept copying. In many ways, these librarians laid the foundation for how the Internet functions and Google’s ambitious early mission statement.
But to me the greatest library innovation at Alexandria was not within the Library or the Musaeum, but the Serapeum, an affiliate library built outside the royal compound, by Ptolemy III (246-222 BC). The Serapeum may have been the first public library, open to all. It was supplied with copies of the scrolls in the main Library. Vallejo quotes a scholar of the time as saying,
“the books at the Serapeum ‘put the entire city in a position to philosophize.'”
It would be another 1,200 years before the first public library was established in Europe. That one was built at a convent in Florence by Cosimo de Medici in a Renaissance style, with a well-lit reading room, 64 benches, and, importantly, a doorway accessible from outside the convent walls. This was in keeping with the intention of the humanist Niccolo Niccoli, who donated the initial collection of books for the library,
“to the common good, to the public service, to a place open to all, so that all eager for education might be able to harvest from it as from a fertile field the rich fruit of learning.”
And, back to the Great Library, there was an inscription said to have been carved above its shelves that captures another value of the Library, which included not just scientific and political treatises, but epic poetry and tales from faraway places:
“The place of the cure for the soul.”
“Libraries … are fragile …”
Okay, here’s where I will dip briefly into another one of the major themes of Vallejo’s book, the multiple destructions of the Great Library and other great libraries down to our present times.
The first destruction is part of the legendary reign of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and her alliance with Julius Caesar around 48 BC. During an insurrection by the Egyptians against the pair, the Romans hurled flaming torches at the Egyptian ships in the harbor, and eventually, fires broke out in the city. Some sources claim the Library was victim to the flames.
Whatever damage was done, that was not the end of the Great Library. It recovered, but was soon attacked by a slower method. When the Roman Empire began its decline, as Vallejo recounts it,
“financial support for maintaining the Musaeum’s collection suffered a series of cuts. There was less and less money for replacing lost, aging, or deteriorating scrolls and for acquiring new ones. By now [the second century AD], the decline was unstoppable.”
Alexandria became a target of attacks and changed hands between Egyptian claimants and the Romans several times in the third and fourth centuries. And then a cataclysmic destruction of the Library occurred in 391 AD, amid confrontations among Christians, pagans of old Greek gods, and the local Jewish community. According to one Roman historian, the walled compound where the Musaeum once stood was “completely wiped off the map.” A group of pagans took refuge in the Serapeum with Christian hostages, but a siege by Roman soldiers ended in the destruction of that building, too.
It’s hard to square those accounts of utter destruction in 391 with those of a third attack around 642. This time, it was a Muslim conqueror, who seems to have regretted his orders to destroy the books found in a collection that was claimed to be the remnants of the Great Library. The Muslim commander is said to have taken a liking to an old Christian scholar who advised that,
“the books be kept and preserved by rulers and their successors, until the end of time.”
The commander hesitated and wrote to his caliph for instructions. When the caliph’s response came, we get a stark view into the kind of extremism that motivates those who destroy books.
“Concerning the books in the Library, here is my response: if their content agrees with the [Koran], they are superfluous; and if not, they are sacrilegious. Go ahead and destroy them.”
Far from an indictment of any particular religion or political ideology, Vallejo’s book covers numerous examples of attempts by a wide range of fanatics to wipe out a hated culture through destruction of their books, art, and the buildings that housed them.
The Nazi example in the photo featured above is familiar to us. The intentional bombing of the National Library of Sarajevo in 1992 and the looting and destruction of the libraries and museums in Iraq during the second Gulf War in 2003 and after show that these hate-driven attacks on libraries remain with us.
As Vallejo put it:
“Libraries, schools, and museums are fragile institutions and cannot survive for long when surrounded by violence.”
And of course, it’s not just violence, burning, and looting that endangers libraries.
Recall the starvation of the Great Library’s resources through Roman budget cuts. Vallejo also notes the tactics of the fascist Franco government in Spain in subjecting librarians — mostly women by the twentieth century — to less desirable positions and “humiliating wage reductions.”
When they come for your libraries …
This brings us to today’s headlines and the lawsuit filed this week by the American Library Association (ALA) and the union representing library workers to challenge the current administration’s “evisceration” of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). IMLS is a small federal agency charged by Congress with supporting library and museum services across the US, particularly through grant funding. Established in 1996, it has received appropriations by Congress continuously, including the recent 2025 Appropriations Act that extended funding through September.
Just as the Romans did to the Great Library, the current administration is attempting to defund our public libraries.
Up to now, American leaders of every era and political persuasion have recognized public libraries as essential to our way of life. Here are just a small sampling of their wisdom:
Thomas Jefferson:
“I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a circulating library in every county.
. . . .
“A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital.”
Abraham Lincoln, of course, was well-known for his self-education by borrowing books from neighbors and libraries throughout his life, including the State Library of Illinois and the Library of Congress.
Franklin D. Roosevelt:
“Libraries are … essential to the functioning of a democratic society … libraries are the great symbols of the freedom of the mind.
. . . .
“I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them”
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“The libraries of America are and must ever remain the home of free and inquiring minds. To them, our citizens — of all ages and races, of all creeds and persuasions — must be able to turn with clear confidence that there they can freely seek the whole truth, unvarnished by fashion and uncompromised by expediency.”
Walter Cronkite:
“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
Laura Bush:
“I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.”
And with a Canadian accent:
Eleanor Crumblehulme,
library assistant, University of British Columbia:
“Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague.”
Perhaps even more so when economic turbulence is part of political upheaval, times of confusion and doubt. Compared with the chaos and disinformation on the internet, a library and its librarians offer some hope of sorting out the truth.
I can’t help myself from offering two more quotes, these from authors, on why — and when — we need libraries and librarians most:
J.K. Rowling:
“When in doubt, go to the library.”
Neil Gaiman:
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.”
What actions can you take to save your local library and libraries nationwide?
- Speak out.
- Connect with fellow readers and library lovers.
- Contact your representatives at every level of government.
- Visit your nearby libraries and find out what they need and how you can support them.
Do not let our precious libraries be destroyed.
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