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The Library

The Library

A Catalogue of Wonders

by Stuart Kells
Hardback
Publication Date: 10/04/2018

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"Excellent . . . Tracks the history of that greatest of all cultural institutions." --The Washington Post

Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. Some still exist today; some are lost, like those of Herculaneum and Alexandria; some have been sold or dispersed; and some never existed, such as those libraries imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.

Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries, scientific libraries, memorial libraries, personal libraries, clandestine libraries: Stuart Kells tells the stories of their creators, their prizes, their secrets, and their fate. To research this book, Kells traveled around the world with his young family like modern-day "Library Tourists." Kells discovered that all the world's libraries are connected in beautiful and complex ways, that in the history of libraries, fascinating patterns arecreated and repeated over centuries. More important, he learned that stories about libraries are stories about people, containing every possible human drama.

The Library is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder. It's a celebration of books as objects, a celebration of the anthropology and physicality of books and bookish space, and an account of the human side of these hallowed spaces by a leading and passionate bibliophile.
ISBN:
9781640090200
9781640090200
Category:
Memoirs
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
10-04-2018
Language:
English
Publisher:
Counterpoint Press
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
228.6x152.4x26.16mm
Weight:
0.57kg
Stuart Kells

Historian Stuart Kells has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the NSW Premier's General History Prize and the University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award. Kells' shorter pieces have appeared in The Paris Review, The Times, Lapham's Quarterly, Smithsonian, The Guardian, National Geographic Traveller and The Daily Beast. He is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University's College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, and a member of the Abbotsford Convent Foundation Board.

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