Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity

This pioneering volume of essays explores the destruction of great libraries since ancient times and examines the intellectual, political and cultural consequences of loss. Fourteen original contributions, introduced by a major re-evaluative history of lost libraries, offer the first ever comparative discussion of the greatest catastrophes in book history from Mesopotamia and Alexandria to the dispersal of monastic and monarchical book collections, the Nazi destruction of Jewish libraries, and the recent horrifying pillage and burning of books in Tibet, Bosnia and Iraq.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; J.Raven Lost Libraries of Ancient Mesopotamia; J.Black Aristotle's 'Peripatetic' Library; T.K.Dix Text to Trophy: Shifting Representations of Regiomontanus's Library; R.L.Kremer The Corvina and the Lost Hungarian Archive; M.Rady Respect for the Dead: The Dispersals of the Library of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester; D.Rundle 'The Manuscripts Flew About Like Butterflies': The Break-Up of English Libraries in the Sixteenth Century; N.Ramsay Secularization and Monastic Libraries in Austria; F.Buchmayr Lost Royal Libraries and Hanoverian Court Culture; C.Campbell Orr Revolutionary Seizures and their Consequences for French Library History; D.Varry A Plague of Books: The Disappearance of the Diocesan Libraries of the Church of Ireland; M.Connolly The Lost Jewish Libraries of Vilna and the Frankfurt Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage; S.C.Sutter China's Roosevelt Library; R.Wang & Y.Yang China's Destruction of the Libraries of Tibet; R.J.Knuth Burn the Books; R.J.Fyne Index

About the Author :
JEREMY BLACK Lecturer in Akkadian, University of Oxford, Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Director of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature FRIEDRICH BUCHMAYR Archivist, Monastery of Sankt Florian, Austria MARGARET CONNOLLY Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, University College, Cork, Ireland T. KEITH DIX Associate Professor of Classics, University of Georgia at Athens, USA ROBERT J. FYNE Professor of English at Kean University, New Jersey, and Senior Editor of Film and History REBECCA J. KNUTH Associate Professor of Library and Information Science, University of Hawaii, Manoa, Hawaii RICHARD L. KREMER Associate Professor of History, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA CLARISSA CAMPBELL ORR Senior Lecturer in History, Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, UK MARTYN RADY Reader in Central European History, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and General Editor of The Slavonic and East European Review NIGEL RAMSAY Senior Research Fellow, Department of History, University College London, UK DAVID RUNDLE James P.R. Lyell Research Fellow in Manuscript Studies and Palaeography, University of Oxford, and Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK SEM C. SUTTER Assistant Director for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Chicago Library, USA DOMINIQUE VARRY Maître e Conférences Habilité à Diriger des Recherche, École Nationale Supérieure des Sciences de l'Information et desBibliothèques (ENSSIB), Lyon, France RUI (RAY) WANG Government Documents Librarian, Humboldt State University, California, USA YULIN YANG Associate Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, Northwest University, Xi'an, People's Republic of China

Review :
'This important collection of essays...goes well beyond outrage to reflect on the complex role libraries have played over several millenia.' - The Times Literary Supplement 'Any interested reader in books and libraries will find a great deal here to facinate and inform, but there is more, for it also offers the reader a great deal of scope for reflection on the meaning of the loss and destruction of libraries...The Introducion 'Resonances of Loss' ranges even wider than the chapters and does so with scholarly assurance and stimulating identification of themes and connections...each chapter of the book has much to offer and the reviewer heartily reccommends it to students of all aspects of the culture of books and libraries' - Paul Sturges, Library History