Quotes from Matthew Battles

In the ideal public library, we are all readers of the "middling sort." Reading whatever we will, we fulfill a public function, preserving the sacrosanct space of inner thought that is our birthright. Assaults on that birthright in the forms of legislation, surveillance, and censorship ultimately are precisely as dangerous as our acquiescence in them.

The middle ages did not care much for alphabetical order, because they were committed to rational order. To the medieval mind, the universe [is] a harmonious whole whose parts are related to one another. It was the responsibility of the author or scholar to discern these rational relationships -- of hierarchy, or of chronology, or of similarities and differences, and so forth.

Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three.

The bibliographer in the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarians, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies.

Topologically, a P and a q are equivalent, as are a coffee mug and a doughnut.

The son of London laborers, Smith was an engraver who taught himself to read Assyrian cuneiform during lunch hours in the British Museum.

explanation of the difference between a language and a dialect:

a language, he said, is a dialect with an army and a navy.

But the library - especially one so vast - is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it's a world, complete and uncompleteable, and it is filled with secrets.