The stacks from cover to cover

Matthew Battles’ discursive inquiry into the life and death of libraries has acquired horrific relevance in the last few weeks. With images of the charred remains of Iraq’s cultural institutions still fresh in our minds, we can only wince to read chapter titles like “Burning Alexandria” and “Knowledge on Fire.” Most painful of all is “The House of Wisdom” -- this was “at once a library, a school, and a research center” established by the Abbasid princes who “made Baghdad a world center of learning.” The contrast with today’s ravaged, shell-shocked city is brutal. So is the fact that the House of Wisdom was also the popular name for the national library of Iraq, a 20th century building whose contents were almost entirely consumed when a postwar mob set fire to it in mid-April.

This destruction undoubtedly appalled the author, who works at Harvard’s Houghton Library for rare books, but seems unlikely to have surprised him. “There is no library that does not ultimately disappear,” he writes, considering a building in Herculaneum filled with blackened scrolls bearing witness to the havoc wrought by Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79. “The tragedy of the Villa of the Papyri is the tragedy of the library throughout history: by bringing books together in one place, cultures and kings inevitably make of them a sacrifice to time.”

Or to bombs, or to desperate people, or to conquerors intent on wiping out all vestiges of the conquered. As he traces the library through history, Battles finds in too many centuries “biblioclasms accidental, revisionary, and comprehensive”: the destruction of books by many means for many motives.

Mercifully, this is not the whole story. “Library” opens with a vision of books in abundance, as the author describes the “compulsive vertigo” he felt when first faced with the vast stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library. He then glides into a lengthy quote from a literary source: “Of Time and the River” by Thomas Wolfe, whose alter ego Eugene Gant prowls through Widener, “pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading them like a madman.” Reading is not a passive activity in this history, aptly subtitled “unquiet”: “Tugged by the gravity of readers’ desires, books flow in and out of the library like the tides. The people who shelve the books in Widener talk about the library’s breathing.”

Battles views books and libraries as intensely physical entities, dynamic and subject to change like the people and societies they serve. Though he evenhandedly chronicles millenniums of conflict between proponents of what he calls the “Parnassan” library, a “storehouse of wisdom, preserving timeless ideals,” and the “universal” library, aiming to collect everything anyone might want to read, it’s clear where his sympathies lie. No wholehearted advocate of the Parnassan library would ever assert, as Battles does, “that unremarkable books have much to teach us about cultural history -- ultimately more, perhaps, than our cherished Great Books.”

The categories of Parnassan and universal, like the narrative as a whole, are loosely defined and erratically developed. For all its contemporary resonances, “Library” is an old-fashioned work, idiosyncratically pursuing the author’s interests through sentences and paragraphs notable for their elegant prose and arresting insights -- but not for systematic organization. Those seeking “a documentary account of libraries wherever they have existed” are advised early on to seek elsewhere. “What I’m looking for,” Battles declares, “are points of transformation ... moments where readers, authors, and librarians question the meaning of the library itself.” These moments aren’t called to our attention with particular clarity, and anyone familiar with the more rigorous methodology of modern historians will notice the author’s tendency to rely on a single source for pages of material. Fair enough. This is not a book for scholars but for general readers, most of whom will be charmed by Battles’ engaging voice and human portrait of libraries.

Each one has a personality, from the “think tank under the control of the royal house” fashioned by Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty at Alexandria to the library of San Marco to the orderly, standardized library Melvil Dewey strove to create with his decimal classification system, in which “local interests and special needs were less important than the efficient movement of books into the hands of readers.” Each one aimed to answer, at least implicitly, the question, “What belongs in the library?” Everything, reply proponents of the universal library. Only the best, argue the Parnassans.

The best, of course, is a notion subject to change and all too likely to be wielded as a weapon in any struggle for political and cultural hegemony. That’s one reason why books and libraries are attacked. This ugly form of historical revision has ancient roots: a Chinese emperor in the 3rd century BC burned Confucian texts that challenged his authority; the Spanish conquistadors destroyed every volume they could find produced by the heathen Aztec, who themselves had burned the ideologically embarrassing works of their ancestors. But after the heady growth of the 19th century, when libraries became great democratic institutions and the catalog was transformed “from an inventory into an instrument of discovery,” the 20th century’s embrace of biblioclasm was frighteningly enthusiastic.

Battles considers it from unusual and illuminating angles. Just as creepy as the Nazis’ book burnings, in his telling, was their deliberate targeting of the Belgian town of Louvain’s library, rebuilt after World War I and in their eyes a “monument to the Allied victory -- and German disgrace.” The Serbs’ destruction in 1992 of the Bosnian National and University Library is chillingly depicted, in a quote from Harvard librarian Andras Riedlmayer, as part of “an attempt to eliminate the material evidence -- books, documents and works of art -- that could remind future generations that people of different ethnic and religious traditions once shared a common heritage.” Leavening the grimness are moving reminders of people’s passionate attachment to books: 4,700 Jews patronizing the shattered remains of the Lithuanian capital’s library in between transports to the death camps; a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo, forced to burn books to cook meals, who quietly said, “Sometimes you look at the books and just choose to go hungry.”

Poignant moments like this give “Library” its emotional weight, balancing the slightly glib erudition with which the author whisks us through five millenniums, casting the briefest of glances at the impact of computers to conclude that “the library in the digital age is in a state of flux, which is indistinguishable from a state of crisis.” Such states are nothing new, his book demonstrates. Since the clay tablets of the earliest Mesopotamian libraries began crumbling away as the Assyrian Empire waned at the end of the 7th century BC, libraries have been born, matured and died alongside the civilizations that bred them, while people contended over their nature and purpose. Rambling and unstructured though it is, Battles’ sprightly narrative performs a valuable service by blowing the dust off our stodgy, conventional conception of the library to reveal the living heart of cultures that beats beneath its stone facade.