Library History

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a world classic - a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a 13-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building.

Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world's most famous author and his work. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare's library, is a mystery. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces, and libraries; in riverbeds, sheep pens, and partridge coops; and in the corridors of the mind. Yet no trace of the Bard's manuscripts, books, or letters has ever been found.

It's just a small story really, about, among other things, a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak's groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can't resist: books.

Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal - including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world. Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want. But what Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other....

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: A revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality - the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born.

The foundations of modern knowledge - philosophy, math, astronomy, geography - were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean....

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put it on the shelf, lend it to a friend, or sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the eBooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your eBook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation - as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers.

Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. The Library is a celebration of books as objects, a celebration of the anthropology and physicality of books and bookish space, and an account of the human side of these hallowed spaces by a leading and passionate bibliophile.

In Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation.

The story of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is very difficult to describe. Usually we give some information about the audiobook, but in this case we think that would spoil the listening. We think it's important that you start to listen without knowing what it is about.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is the remarkable story of a strange and beautiful Indian girl who lives a serene and courageous life as the solitary survivor on an island off the California coast. Left behind when the rest of her tribe fled, she waits, year after year, for a ship to come for her. She fights for her very survival, building a shelter, hunting for food, and making weapons to stave off her enemies, the wild dogs who took her brother.

Although all the titles of the Nag Hammadi library are not known, many people have heard about its most famous components: The Gospel of Thomas - at one time it was discussed whether it should be included in the New Testament - and The Gospel of Philip, which tried to revive the debate around the identity of Mary Magdalene: "Why do you love her more than all of us?" asks a disconcerted Peter to Jesus. Finally, the Nag Hammadi texts have led many scholars to reconsider the rigid canons imposed by the early Church, and the readers to find a more intimate religion that turned upside down many postulates of Christian orthodoxy.

It's 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one.

King Duncan and Princess Cassandra are trapped in the south tower of Castle Araluen and under near-constant attack from the Red Fox Clan. Sir Horace and Ranger Commandant Gilan are holed up in an old hill fort, surrounded by the enemy. And Ranger's apprentice Maddie is the only one who can save them all. With the help of Hal, Thorn, and the rest of the Heron brotherband, Maddie will have to break her father and his men out of the hill fort, but will they reach Castle Araluen in time?

The Revolutionary War is seen through the eyes of a British family to whom an American prisoner of war has been entrusted. Technically the young prisoner is in Uncle Lawrence's custody, but the children soon forge a forbidden friendship with him. He becomes the Reb and they his Redcoats.

From world-renowned historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, the New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens, comes an exciting, brand-new audiobook for middle-grade listeners that looks at the early history of humankind.

Superb stories, daring deeds, fantastic adventures! Going Solo is the action-packed tale of Roald Dahl's exploits as a World War II pilot. Learn all about his encounters with the enemy, his worldwide travels, the life-threatening injuries he sustained in a plane accident, and the rest of his sometimes bizarre, often unnerving, and always colorful adventures. Told with the same irresistible appeal that has made Roald Dahl one of the world's best-loved writers, Going Solo brings you directly into the action and into the mind of this fascinating man.

Lina is just like any other 15-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys - until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia.