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The Library: A Fragile History. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, eds. New York: Basic Books, 2021. 518 pp. + color pls. $35.

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The Library: A Fragile History. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, eds. New York: Basic Books, 2021. 518 pp. + color pls. $35.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2024

Kevin Windhauser*
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis
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Abstract

Type
Review
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America

In The Library: A Fragile History, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, a pair of scholars with considerable experience as coauthors and coeditors of works examining histories of reading, book production, and information exchange in early modern Europe, turn their attention to a subject of much wider geographical and chronological scope: a popular history of the library. Surveying library history from the Assyrian Empire to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pettegree and der Weduwen lay out a narrative that is accessible to nonspecialist readers but that resists the hagiography common to popular histories of reading and libraries—as they declare in the book's preface, “we should not romanticise libraries, not least because their owners seldom did” (14). As a single-volume history of an expansive subject, The Library is not without its elisions and omissions, but the book's mix of accessible prose and critical nuance make it a valuable text for anything from undergraduate teaching to public humanities work.

The Library is divided into six parts, arranged chronologically. The first runs at breakneck speed from ancient libraries to the invention of print. The remainder examine, at a more deliberate pace, institutional, communal, and private libraries of the early modern period (parts 2, 3, and 4), the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular attention paid to subscription libraries and the rise of the novel, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a focus on the emergence of the public library as we understand it today. Throughout, Pettegree and der Weduwen develop a narrative of destruction and renewal, highlighting libraries’ vulnerability to fire, warfare, natural disaster, and, above all, neglect. Simultaneously, this narrative emphasizes the durability of the library as a concept; even as individual libraries fall, the institution proves adaptable to historical change. Pettegree and der Weduwen take pains to place these library developments within a larger context of the history of reading, making The Library a convenient introduction for a general readership not only to the history of libraries but also histories of reading.

Pettegree and der Weduwen's own intellectual backgrounds are apparent in the structure and focus of the volume. Three of its six parts are given over to the early modern period, and while the final two sections turn some attention toward the United States, the primary geographic focus of the work is Western Europe. The book's predominant focus on Europe and the United States leads to omissions and reductions, and the book would be more accurately described as a history of the library in the West than as a global history. Most seriously, brief moments in which libraries of other nations are discussed find these spaces understood only in comparison to the West, as when “the greatest cities of Andalusia, Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia” are summarized as having “nurtured brilliant scribes who were as talented as those working around Notre Dame or in the workshops of Bruges” (69). The Library would do a general readership a service in moments such as this by directing them to a growing body of rich work examining global histories of reading and library-building rather than offering brief presentations of non-Western histories through comparison alone.

The geographic focus, however, often allows the authors to introduce readers to finer distinctions between library development in European nations, which make up the most compelling moments in the text. In one example, “Reading on the Job,” a chapter focused on the early twentieth century growth of public libraries, delves deeply into salient differences in the development of the British, American, and French public library systems, with the latter nation's libraries finding far less public interest, a discrepancy the authors link to the French Revolution's spoiling of monastic libraries, which left French libraries with an enviable surplus of books but few that would suit the tastes of the reading public. Moments such as this one—and there are many throughout The Library—find Pettegree and der Weduwen admirably managing the difficult balancing act of nonspecialist accessibility and specialist detail. In doing so, they have created a volume considerably useful for extending the study of reading, book collecting, and library building to new and wider audiences.