Travels in the Republic of Letters

Worlds Made by Words
By Anthony Grafton
Harvard, 422 pages, $29.95

Early in the last century, when the German historian Adolf von Harnack was appointed head of the Prussian State Library in Berlin, he chose as a legend for the entranceway the Latin tag Bibliotheca docet: "The Library Teaches." This wasn't just another pompous building-decorating slogan.
Libraries still teach.

For von Harnack, the ideal library hosted on its shelves a lively, if silent, conversation of past with present. The future too was an implicit partner; after all, who knew what might prove important to generations yet to come? If the library "teaches," it does so by promoting this timeless colloquy. Von Harnack believed, too, that "one book is no book." Authors may be touchy, but books are naturally gregarious; they converse with one another and sometimes strike sparks. Only by offering the widest array of resources, von Harnack maintained, could a library provoke that tiny, unpredictable flash of insight on which all scholarship depends.

Thus, information sources interact with one another, and with the reader and researcher.

Today von Harnack's grand dream seems quixotic. Libraries are increasingly seen less as collections of printed materials and more as purveyors of access to data bases and online information.
O, drat, the future has changed the present, and nt for the better. What a common complaint. Off the mark, too.

Mr. Grafton may be steeped in the past, but he is no antiquarian. He is quick to link submerged traditions with present trends. He regards recent developments in technology, and their effects on libraries and on reading, as both a blessing and a burden. Ideally, new technologies don't displace old ones; they augment them. Cuneiform tablets, papyri, manuscripts, as well as books, remain essential to scholarship and to learning at large, if only because the look and feel of the past can be as important as its content. The larger, more troubling question is: Who will read them in the future? Sometimes Mr. Grafton sounds an elegiac note; he laments "the dull, provincial scholarship of our own sad time." He may be right to do so. Nevertheless, he himself represents the best proof that the Republic of Letters is alive and kicking.

People still read, do research, and learn.