Libraries Through The Ages

Loucinda McGary of the Romance Bandits, who blogged here about the Library of Celsius in the Roman city of Ephesus, present-day Turkey, said, "The library was heaven on earth for me, and I'm definitely not the only one." Indeed not.

Even children in Colombia's war-weary Caribbean hinterland hunger for the books that only Luis Soriano can bring them. Every Saturday without fail, Soriano loads up his two donkeys Alfa and Beto with picture books, dictionaries, fables, and tales of derring-do and heads off into the small villages clinging to steep hillsides. His home has hardly any living space because it's stuffed to the rafters with books.

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Soriano's Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve the lives of the people of this impoverished region.

Diametrically opposite to this is Jay Walker's lavish Geek Library, a bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. The room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels with artifacts, such as the Sputnik, books bound in real rubies, a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London, and a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. There's even a massive "book" by the window, which is a specially commissioned, internally lit 2.5-ton Clyde Lynds sculpture.

By far more modest is my library...

...and the spill-over from my library, that's most likely to go on IKEA bookshelves in the study but is now piled up sculpture-style in one corner of the living room.

Since ancient times, libraries and learning have reserved a revered place in human society and culture. Take for example: the 3rd century BCE Library of Alexandra, the Buddhist Nalanda University from 500 CE India, engraved oracle bone repositories of 1700 BCE China, Sumerian clay tablets from 4,000 BCE Iraq, and a 200,000-volume Library of Pergamum in the Hellinistic Age.

While I'm more likely to keep graveyard hours than those averred by an old Sumerian proverb: "He who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn," I'm in awe of the fact that women in early Mesopotamia learned to read and write just like the men, and there were libraries in most towns and temples. The ancients were rather modern in their outlook, wouldn't you say?

Speaking of modern, library building designs these days, range from odes to the Romans, like the Vancouver Library in B.C., to the high-tech space of Geisel Library on the grounds of the University of California in San Diego, and everything in between.

Now, here's a library I would looooooooove to have. Which is your Library of Drool?

Whether your library is a humble bookmobile that comes every Saturday to your neighborhood cul-de-sac or a multi-storey building in a prime downtown spot, do you frequent the place?

[Editied to add photos of the Library of the House of Lords, UK. Oceans of drool...]