Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen — The Library- A Fragile History

137 published claims from this book.

• A monastery assembled a 2000-book library from only forty-eight volumes
• A permanent acquisitions endowment proved essential to a library’s survival.
• Alexandria pioneered alphabetical and genre-based cataloguing that became the standard
• American library staffing was 85 per cent female by 1914
• Antiquarian collectors prized books whose content contradicted their conservative values
• Athens created an official archive to combat corrupt texts by 338 bc
• Auction catalogues preserved professional libraries, a critical collecting moment
• Australia’s 1976 Horton report anticipated the modern library identity crisis
• Baroque library design sacrificed reading space for visual display
• Baroque monastic libraries prioritized spectacle over reading accommodation
• Basel deliberately defaced vellum manuscripts to spurn Catholics
• Book auctions were ridiculed as places where bibliophiles wasted their money
• Books are what distinguish libraries from other public community spaces
• Books carried totemic symbolic value beyond their textual content.
• Boots Booklovers Library circulated 50 million books a year through pharmacy branches
• British book exports to India grew from £8,725 to £313,772 between 1791 and 1860
• British troops in India were the first in the world to get permanent libraries
• Carnegie libraries required host cities to levy matching tax support
• Catholic monasteries served as major book collecting centers in Spanish South America
• Cheap reformation pamphlets drew new buyers into book ownership
• Circulating library catalogues contained surprisingly little fiction stock
• Cold War competition with the Soviet Union drove US rural library expansion
• Colonial archives deliberately destroyed documents deemed too sensitive or lowly to preserve
• Conquest-era book destruction aimed to demoralize foes and eradicate rival religions
• Dissolution-era library books were used as toilet paper, kindling, and ballast
• Dropping book prices, not public libraries, destroyed American circulating libraries
• Dutch colonial libraries in Indonesia speeded literacy but undermined colonial rule
• Dutch ministers averaged 1,144 books per library in the seventeenth century
• Dutch municipal libraries prioritized prestige Latin works over vernacular books readers wanted
• Dutch Revolt plundering devastated early town libraries like Zutphen’s
• Early Christian texts were almost universally produced as codices
• Early modern books held their resale value and served as pension planning
• Early presses printed sheet-by-sheet with no saleable book for months
• Early printed books were sold as binder’s waste until the 1700s.
• Early printers faced lethal financial risk in guessing print run sizes
• Early printers shifted book production from commission to speculation
• Early public library patrons were aspirational and sought self-improvement
• Eighteenth-century libraries served as social gathering places as much as study spaces
• English realist fiction failed to appeal to colonial Indian readers
• Erasmus valued access to texts over owning them
• Europe’s warring faiths shared a common canon of essential books.
• Faster European publishing made library destruction less effective as a weapon
• Federico’s famed Urbino library collapsed into ruin within a century.
• Few medieval monasteries had libraries larger than 500 or 600 volumes
• France lost between ten and twenty million book volumes to Germany
• German artillery destroyed all three Strasbourg libraries in 1870
• High prices for new fiction made circulating libraries the main reading channel
• Hitler’s public library programme dramatically expanded Germany’s libraries
• Ipswich library marked each donated book with the donor’s printed label
• Jesuit suppression in 1759 crippled Brazilian and Peruvian education
• Leading English monasteries held roughly 2,000 volumes each by 1535
• Librarians relinquished curatorial selection by embracing the digital revolution
• Librarians supplied popular romance fiction only to justify continued funding.
• Libraries arranged books by scholarly faculty until the eighteenth century
• Libraries began to prize books for physical attributes over content.
• Libraries decline mainly through neglect and redundancy, not deliberate destruction.
• Libraries eventually yielded to reader demand for romantic fiction
• Libraries functioned as instruments of nationalizing contested border regions
• Libraries remain targeted symbols of cultural power in modern conflicts.
• Libraries survive because they are slow-thinking spaces
• Libraries were active participants in war, not just victims
• Library architecture can override user needs when visions clash
• Loaning out the three volumes separately tripled Mudie’s per-novel profit
• Luther exploited the printing press with short vernacular pamphlets
• Macmillan’s Colonial Library shipped 680 overseas-only titles, mostly fiction
• Manuscript collectors assembled bespoke texts, a freedom print abolished
• Manuscript rarification took roughly a century to restore collector value
• Manuscript-era readers could compile bespoke texts; print ended that autonomy.
• Medieval monastic libraries rarely exceeded a few hundred volumes
• Medieval stationers broke textbooks into rentable quires to speed copying
• Monastery dissolution caused England’s largest land transfer since 1066
• Monastic copyists preserved virtually all surviving classical Roman texts
• Most early New England subscription libraries failed within fifty years
• Mudie’s purchasing power functioned as a national monopoly on new fiction
• Mudie’s subscription library held a national monopoly over new fiction publication
• Naudé amassed 40,000 books for Mazarin within two years
• Nazi book policy combined total destruction with systematic collection
• Nazi Germany converted public library holdings entirely to propaganda
• Neglect destroyed more ancient libraries than war or malice did
• New Zealand settlers founded 769 subscription libraries as their population grew to a million
• Non-European cultures largely rejected print, keeping book collecting elite.
• Open-shelf college libraries traded security for reading access
• Oxford’s Bodleian grew from 2,000 to 23,000 volumes within two decades.
• Papal power enabled the Barberini to compel monasteries into selling books
• Paper arrived in Europe centuries before it displaced parchment for books
• Paper manufacture required only rags and running water
• Paper manufacturing was cheaper than parchment but initially used only for minor documents
• Paper was initially used for administration before bookmaking
• Papyrus availability enabled Greek culture’s shift from oral to written form
• Papyrus texts require continuous curation and perish if neglected.
• Parchment displaced papyrus because it was durable and writable on both sides
• Parchment displaced papyrus despite being far more expensive
• Parchment supply could not match press demand, forcing a shift to paper
• Peasants destroyed libraries to erase legal proof of feudal obligations
• Peterborough, New Hampshire founded the first tax-funded public library in 1833
• Plymouth colony colonists owned and recycled surprisingly large book collections.
• Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered major lost classical works in northern monasteries
• Print did not immediately collapse manuscript book production
• Print’s abundance made destroyed libraries swiftly replaceable
• Printing collapsed book prices to roughly parchment-market value levels
• Printing did not immediately collapse manuscript culture
• Private libraries functioned mainly as intellectual and financial assets, not display
• Private professionals, not institutions, shaped libraries for two centuries
• Public libraries shifted from learning institutions to social services by the 1960s
• Purchase registers reveal the sixteenth-century international book trade
• Radio and cinema first challenged print’s monopoly on the imagination since Gutenberg
• Radio ownership absorbed a large share of American household spending in the 1920s
• Radio’s fixed schedule undercut reading’s flexibility as a leisure activity
• Random browsing distinguishes libraries from other community spaces
• Reformation town libraries inherited unusable Catholic monastic book hoards
• Roman libraries served as political monuments to their founders
• Rome’s chief library legacy was the shift from papyrus to parchment.
• San Francisco’s 1996 New Main library dumped hundreds of thousands of books
• San Marco’s public library served up to a thousand literate male citizens
• Seventeenth-century libraries shifted from lecterns to wall shelving
• Sixteenth-century bookshops and pedlars expanded book ownership in Europe
• Slave-led Catholic worship helped get the Jesuits expelled in the 1760s.
• The 1871 Chicago fire gave the city its first free public library
• The 1960 Lady Chatterley trial legalized unexpurgated publishing in Britain
• The Alexandrian library’s scale forced the first systematic cataloguing systems.
• The antiquarian book market formed within a century.
• The circulation of books upward through society led to national libraries
• The dissolution commission ignored books though libraries were the largest in England
• The Dutch book auction revolutionized book collecting almost as much as printing itself
• The fall of Rome disrupted papyrus supply, making parchment the standard
• The Folgers amassed 82 copies of a book with only 200 surviving
• The great Chicago fire destroyed up to three million library volumes
• The library of Alexandria was a salaried scholarly academy, not a public library
• The papal index blacklisted entire printers’ outputs wholesale
• The pecia system began in Bologna in the early thirteenth century
• The physical book has survived every technological challenger so far
• The public library was conceived as a moral reform instrument from its earliest plans
• The tie between library and nation state was a nineteenth-century development
• War transformed open scientific exchange into guarded state secrets
• Wartime propaganda pamphlets could sell hundreds of thousands of copies
• What we preserve today may not be valued by our descendants
• Widespread book ownership drove the aristocracy to abandon books as status symbols