Lost Libraries

This 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 horrifying pillage and burning in Tibet, Bosnia and Iraq.

Author Biography

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