The war of the libraries

Sorting books in the home library, I stumbled upon the catalog of a photographic exhibition about libraries, from thirty years ago (1996), in which the art historian Francesc Miralles Bofarull, in the introductory text, goes back to the prehistory of the book, when the cities of Alexandria and Pergamon competed for who had the best library. The book was a cutting-edge technology, synonymous with innovation, power, knowledge, and information. It was the AI of its time. If AI is dedicated to collecting, processing, and exploiting all millennia of bookish information, the books of then fixed for the present and posterity all preceding oral knowledge.

Around 290 BC, Ptolemy I, advised by the Athenian philosopher and politician Demetrius of Phalerum, created the Museum of Alexandria, with its library. His successors continued to expand it – it came to contain 700,000 titles – until Ptolemy V, to prevent Eumenes of Pergamon from surpassing him with the library of the rival city, prohibited the export of papyrus (reeds), a plant with which the scroll-books were made. In the midst of that cold war for knowledge and control of texts, Eumenes sought a new technological solution: to write on animal skins. Thus, parchment was born in Pergamon, which would last for centuries.

(In the medieval era, the monastery of Poblet had numerous flocks of sheep to ensure the production of parchment. Until the invention of the printing press, the paper book did not prevail over parchment. The work of Irene Vallejo, Infinity in a Reed, masterfully narrates the birth and evolution of the book from ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt to the present day).

The two great libraries of antiquity became military objectives. In 48 BC, Julius Caesar set fire to that of Alexandria, but the also Roman Mark Antony rebuilt it and, to fill it again with books, sacked that of Pergamon and took two hundred thousand volumes, which he gave to his Egyptian lover Cleopatra. The book was a valuable and coveted object. Today, does anyone imagine Trump or Putin with a book in their hands? The collaborators of the American president say that he is incapable of reading even a minimally extensive report. It is supposed that he wrote one, a book, The Art of the Deal (1987). Definitely, Trump and Putin are not Ptolemy or Eumenes. If only today we had cold wars for libraries.

Amidst the rise and predominance of audiovisual culture, libraries and books maintain a certain minority prestige. But, labor disputes aside – Catalan ones are currently on strike – their survival cannot be taken for granted. Cultural habits are changing rapidly. Reading on screens, more volatile and dispersed, is gaining ground. A city with libraries and bookstores is a city that has cultural ambition, that cares for memory, and that wants to generate creativity and thought. One of the great deficits we carry is the lack of libraries in schools and institutes – not a classroom with books, but a library organized and managed by a professional. The reading habit is created in childhood and adolescence.

Now that it is summer, I wonder: Why isn't there more library tourism? The new Library of Alexandria should be a must. Or that of the Congress of Washington, the British Library in London, the Bodleian in Oxford, the National Library of Paris, and so many others. There are also many unique bookstores. The Library of Catalonia, with its beautiful Gothic halls, is largely unknown to most Barcelonans and Catalans. Decades ago, the tandem Oriol Bohigas-Dolors Lamarca (both now deceased) imagined a kind of Louvre pyramid covering the Rubió i Lluch gardens, so degraded, turning them into a monumental hall and reading room for the Library of Catalonia. It would have been a fabulous cultural icon for Barcelona. The project must be sleeping in some municipal drawer.

Now libraries are climate shelters. And all year round they are refuges of serenity where life slows down and you can feel the breath of atavistic wisdom. Places to dream of the Ptolemies – there was everything in that long dynasty, of course – and to forget the Trumps.