How to Plan a Library Building for Library Work

No precedents of buildings or fixtures loom out of the farthest past. Arch ological excavations have found relics of libraries in early ruins, libraries of baked clay tablets, evidently once housed in separate rooms on upper stories of palaces or temples. This literature must have seemed imperishable. There were no fading inks, no crumbling paper, no danger from moisture or worms. But an older foe, still threatening libraries, lurked in that brick era of literature. Fire, both worshiped and feared, was finally fatal. Fire following conquest attacked the oldest libraries and dropped them in shattered fragments into prehistoric cellars, to lie for centuries awaiting exhumation. But even as now resurrected, they tell no tales of their housing or shelving or circulation. It would seem hopeless to grope among these shards for lessons in library science. And yet Dr. Richard Garnett deduced from an Assyrian hexagonal book tablet the idea of hexagonal bookcases for the British Museum.