Quotes from Margaret Leslie Davis

Printing meant arranging the letters into words, the words into perfectly straight lines, and the lines into even blocks of text to be inked and pressed onto paper or vellum. And each small step of the process, which sounds so mundane today, required invention.

As historian Albert L. Hurtado wrote, War, pestilence, and famine blow books around the planet like so many hostages to uncertain fortune. Thieves steal, vandals deface, pious clergy burn, and worms eat books. Whether threatened by worms or war, there is nothing permanent about books and libraries.

Anxiety-neurosis had been observed in soldiers in World War I, but once a soldier was removed from the stress of combat, symptoms generally disappeared.

hundreds of decorated automobiles and elaborate floats, one featuring a roaring lion, declawed for the occasion but symbolizing the fierce determined spirit of the city, was turned out for two hundred and fifty thousand gasping Angelenos thronged in the streets to marvel at in wondrous civic pride.

A man's worth is measured by his importance to society and to humanity generally