We are intrinsically nostalgic animals for whom mourning is a form of recognition. Our preferred genre is the elegy. As long as something remains obviously present, we pay little attention to it, but as soon as we believe that it’s fading away, we feel irresistibly attracted to the ruins. The examples are many. When, in the mid-twentieth century, the automobile became our principal means of locomotion, Bill Bowerman, an athletics coach at the University of Oregon, published Jogging, the book that first celebrated the use of our own two feet. A few decades after film became the most popular form of entertainment, theatre, considered moribund, was revived, re-examined and redefined by Stanislavski, Brecht and Artaud. And in the late fifteenth century, when the recent invention of printing seemed to threaten the survival of the manuscript, handbooks of calligraphy began to flourish, collections of letters (such as those of Cicero) became bestsellers, and scribes produced manuscripts for avid collectors by copying texts from newly printed books.

Today, when electronic technology announces (perhaps prematurely) the death of paper and promises us unfading memory of many millions of texts and images, as well as apparently limitless storage in cyberspace, the question “What is a library?” pops up with satisfying frequency on our bookshelves, both virtual and concrete. I count more than 150 books on the subject of libraries published between 2010 and 2012, a period during which 140 public libraries were closed in Britain alone. One of the latest volumes to be published on this potentially mournful subject is a wonderfully informative, erudite and entertaining collection of essays edited by Alice Crawford, The Meaning of the Library, whose subtitle, A cultural history, goes a long way to hinting at an answer. These essays, “full of oppositions”, as Crawford says in her introduction, were collected between 2009 and 2013, and originally formed part of a series of lectures given at the University of St Andrews Library to celebrate the birthday of the venerable King James Library, founded in 1612 by James VI and I. At least in print, resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia.

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We must agree with Billington that these qualities of a library, however wishful, however difficult to achieve, are necessary – even vital. They vindicate our sense that libraries should be preserved, multiplied, respected and helped to grow. The injustice and misery of this world are almost impossible at times to bear, and no amount of books will remedy a single instance of deliberately inflicted suffering. Libraries, however – these assemblies of books that we have sheltered from the dilapidations of time since the days of Alexandria – may help us remember who we are, and where we are, and the many things we have done wrong, and the few things we have got right. “Collecting: to assert control over what’s unbearable”, wrote Ruth Padel. Perhaps this is the ultimate meaning of a library, and its modest justification.