The Christian community of Rome, since its origins, was adamant in preserving written texts. Documents and books of multiple kinds were treated as important, precious objects. The history of the popes’ libraries exemplifies this approach. In addition to spreading Christianity and keeping records of discussions and decisions taken by the Church, the library was intended as a repository not only of religious books but also of literary and scientific texts of non-Christian traditions, including pagan classics and others. The mission of ensuring the conservation and spreading of the knowledge was clearly stated during humanism, when the current Vatican Apostolic Library was founded. Books were there made accessible “for the common benefit of the learned.” Such a mission continues today. The papacy considers the Library and its books to be the “heritage of mankind,” one that needs to be made available for generations through continuous technological innovations and cutting-edge preservation strategies.

Through patronage of art, architecture, and classical scholarship and through development of classically inspired rhetoric and ceremonies, the popes of the medieval and early modern periods promoted the recovery and reinterpretation of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Critics (including Roman civic leaders, Renaissance humanists, and Protestant reformers) pilloried the papal court as a symbol of corruption and cultural stagnation, but pontiffs and their advisers continued to adapt ancient and early Christian precedents to support their traditional claims to authority and to justify their new initiatives. This chapter argues that the papacy played a vital role in recovering and using the classical legacy throughout the (long) Middle Ages. It also argues that the venues and motivations for this appropriation remained more consistent than standard periodization of the medieval, Renaissance, and Counter Reformation papacy has suggested.

Goldsmith’s library is suggestive of his wide interests and of his status as a participant in the circulation of Enlightenment thought. His books were auctioned off after his death and they were advertised as a ‘Select Collection of Scarce, Curious and Valuable Books, in English, Latin, Greek, French, Italian and other Languages’. The chapter extrapolates the main trends within Goldsmith’s collection from the catalogue but also addresses the difficulties of drawing conclusions about the owner of a collection from an auction catalogue. The discernible referentiality of Goldsmith’s works provides, in many ways, a preferable index of his reading. The chapter also discusses the opportunities for reading books without owning them that Goldsmith, whose means were always limited, would have had as a student in Dublin, Edinburgh and Leiden and as a writer in London.

A discussion of where, why and how parchment material was preserved in the Middle Ages, distinguishing broadly between books kept in libraries and documents kept in archives. The distinction between outgoing and incoming archives and a case study of two documents of the emperor Frederick II.

A detailed analysis of the medieval material in the Municipal Library at Chartres destroyed in the US air raid of 1944. This serves as an introduction to many aspects of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. Discussion of work on the intellectual world of Chartres and of the birth of American Romantic medievalism.

Focusing on the eighteenth century, this chapter uses the surviving books from the manuscript library of the Buffalo Agency to reveal how Ibadi intellectual, religious, and commercial life in Ottoman Cairo intersected with that of their non-Ibadi contemporaries. Beyond funding the endowment for students at the Buffalo Agency, Ibadi merchants were also often the ones responsible for gifting or commissioning the books in its library. The books themselves included roughly equal numbers of Sunni and Ibadi titles. It traces the relationship of Ibadis with the famous (Sunni) al-Azhar Mosque and how the library of the Buffalo Agency reflects this relationship. In all cases, from the production of books to their endowment and use by students, Ibadis mirror the social and religious trends of their Sunni contemporaries in the Ottoman period.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the three key fields of colonial knowledge and shows some of the later trajectories of these rich archives. Australian data proved central to key ideas that were fomented during the nineteenth century, and which continue to affect contemporary society. Debates about civilisational orders, and about the role of science and religion in relation to the extension of imperial power and economic privilege, were widespread. The distinctive nature of the Australian colonial experiment continues to make important contributions to global debates about the history of humanitarianism and human rights, apologies and reparations sought by colonised and displaced peoples for the wrongs of imperialism and colonial governance, and the uneven distribution of wealth, up to the twenty-first century.

This chapter explores the reconstruction of intellectual sites in the aftermath of the war and the attempts to replace the knowledge that had been lost in warfare. It focuses on the reconstruction of the university libraries of Louvain and Belgrade and pays particular attention to not only the physical rebuilding of buildings but also the reconstruction of knowledge itself through the replacement of their collections. It also explores the reconstruction of Tokyo Imperial University in following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. While the latter took place beyond Europe, it aroused great public sympathy and became part of the wider process of symbolic rebuilding. The chapter argues that cultural reconstruction was not just about replacing or repairing heritage sites that had suffered war damage but also about providing of the tools for the production and dissemination of new knowledge and symbolically pushing back against the ‘collapse’ of civilization.

This final chapter follows the journey of Jerban student Sālim Bin Yaʿqūb (d. 1991) from Tunisia to Egypt, where he lived at the Buffalo Agency in the twilight years of its existence in the 1930s. The chapter draws on a diverse body of materials including manuscripts from his private library, his research notes, and a recorded interview from the 1980s with him about his time in Cairo. He spent much of his life in the decades following his return from Egypt to Tunisia preparing materials for a book just like this one. Bin Yaʿqūb’s story is thus at once that of the gradual disintegration of the Agency and its library and the earliest attempt to preserve the memory of the Ibadi community in Cairo and the Buffalo Agency before it disappeared. Although he died before writing it, the idea for his book both inspired and laid the foundation for this one.

Late modernism in the US, lasting roughly from 1945 to 1960, is characterized by two simultaneous yet contradictory developments. In one, the techniques and, to a lesser extent, themes of international literary modernism continued to infuse America’s literary bloodstream, diversifying, spreading, and becoming part of the common artistic vocabulary, particularly for underground or countercultural movements. But at the same time, the major institutions of elite culture in the US such as publishers, universities, book-review magazines, and even foundations and the government gradually and then wholeheartedly adopted it in the 1950s and rewrote its history to create a kind of “official” modernism. If late modernism was a set of techniques bereft of a mission, Cold War modernism then voided the modernist project of any urgency or sociopolitical critique, reframing it as the highest expression of the self-satisfied liberal society that avant-garde modernism had always reviled.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.

This chapter centers on the controversy between Lord Wellesley (1798–1805) and the Company’s Court of Directors over the College of Fort William. It shows that this controversy turned fundamentally on the danger Wellesley’s pet project posed to the Company state. The college served to aggrandize the governor-general at the directors’ expense and to establish his own legitimacy with multiple audiences. It would do this not through conciliation but through the projection of an image of grandeur consonant with a kingly territorial sovereignty. In a sign of the threat posed by Wellesley’s ideas, the directors continued to fear them long after his departure. Ongoing disputes over books, natural history, and scholar-officials suggested that his “revolution” was far from finished.

The Minerva Press brand was officially retired in 1820, but its reputation, influence, and significance as an avatar of literary excess persisted long past that end-point. Not only did its erstwhile publisher, A. K. Newman, continue a robust publishing business under his own name in the same premises for more than a decade, but derogatory references to the Press in popular media continued to rise in the decade following its demise. The epilogue begins with an account of the last two Minerva novels, belatedly published in 1821, and traces the press’s influence from them through its reputation in the 1830s and 1840s, concluding with a discussion of the fate of these countless works, long unwanted by copyright libraries, and an account of the publisher Henry Colburn, whose large-scale publishing business attracted many of the same criticisms in the 1820s and 1830s as Lane and Newman’s had done at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The epilogue concludes in the present day, examining recent reappearances of the Minerva Press in historical romance novels and exploring the affinities between popular fiction then and now.