The Beginnings of Libraries

Before the printing press, before the codex, before writing itself, humans understood that knowledge must be saved from oblivion. Ernest Cushing Richardson's 1914 work traces this extraordinary impulse across millennia, from clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia to the great collecting houses of the medieval world. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, he follows the fragments of human memory, what was lost and what survived, how civilizations organized their wisdom, and why some libraries became temples of learning while others became kindling. This is not mere cataloging. It is an argument about what we choose to preserve and why. Originally delivered as an address to the New York Public Library's training school, the text carries a professor's urgency, a belief that those who tend books must understand their sacred lineage. For anyone who has stood in a great library and wondered about the first one, the first librarian, the first determined soul who said 'this must not be forgotten.'