The Cyrus Cylinder: Historical Object and Emblem

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, traces 2600 years of Middle Eastern history through the Cyrus Cylinder:

New Form of an Old Icebreaker

At the end of Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel The Last Man, a story of the future told from ancient Sibylline leaves, the last man sets off in a boat with "scant stores" and "a few books." If you were the last human, what books would you select?

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From Gutenberg to Gruenewald

More on the Bible App and YouVersion, from “The New Roman Roads: Technology and Bible Reading” (HuffPost): 

Several Bible publishers and license holders, however, have allowed sites such as YouVersion and BibleGateway to publish their versions digitally since they have found it has not hindered print sales, but has actually increased them and provided broad network of promotion.

From Ebooks to Networked Books

Hugh McGuire asks: What is the difference between an ebook and the internet? Ebooks can be made to look like print books, but they are more like the internet. The best future for the book would be p+e+i. E.g., YouVersion:­ a “Bible App [that] allows users to read the Bible, share verses with their social networks, bookmark their favorite passages, and more.”

Here is McGuire's TEDx Montreal talk, “The Blurring Lines Between Books and the Internet”:

Charles Williams on Librarians

From “The Masque of Perusal,” originally performed before the staff of the Oxford University Press in the Amen House library, London, February 8, 1929:

ALEXIS:        

But let me bring you to the Librarian,

Who—as the song goes, through the city chanted—

Will give such information as is wanted.

ALL:  

On the ancient laws of Solon,

            On the mechanics and on men,

On the place of either colon,

            On the acuter abdomen,

On physic for the body and the mind

The Keeper offers help of every kind.

On the secret name of Sunday,

            On the causes of the war,

On the rise of Mrs. Grundy,

            Khalif, pope, and emperor,

And on the causes of all joy and woe,

The Keeper lets her information flow.

Another Apologia for the Personal Library

Leon Wieseltier, over at the The New Republic, contemplates his personal library as it is being moved. (Sound familiar?) He says: 

The library, like the book, is under assault by the new technologies, which propose to collect and to deliver texts differently, more efficiently, outside of space and in a rush of time.

But as he considers the crates piled high in the hall, he defends his volumes: 

My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. And a book is more than a text: even if every book in my library is on Google Books, my library is not on Google Books. A library has a personality, a temperament.

Much of this resonated with me, but then he quotes Borges—“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library”—and concludes that, “if paradise lies in the future, it will certainly not be a library. A different arrangement awaits our minds.”

Perhaps the promise of the paradisiacal library is that it will manifest a different arrangement or pattern. Until then, our libraries “reveal and represent to us what was, what is, and what is to come” (that’s me, defending my library”).