The Book at War by Andrew Pettegree: Role of libraries in history and their shelved contents

Growing up in Derry in the 1970s, my understanding was that libraries were naturally housed in portakabins. Our local branch library and the city’s central library were both accommodated for years in such temporary structures: library buildings had been burned out, again and again, in the course of the Troubles, their collections burning with them. These replacement “huts” were snug and brilliantly lit: and to a child’s eye, they did the job nicely.

I remembered this association as I read The Book at War, Andrew Pettegree’s endlessly fascinating analysis of the part played in history by libraries and their shelved contents - and was reminded too that this association was simultaneously profoundly abnormal and all too representative of the smoke-damage, blood-soaked relationship between politics and the printed word. Pettegree emphasises that the institution of the library can seldom be regarded as ideologically neutral. Quite the reverse is the case: the library, in its choices and policies and attached symbolism, and the printed book it houses, weighted with meaning and intentionality, speak volumes about a society’s sense of itself.

National rivalries

This ideological importance explains the sustained targeting of libraries in time of conflict: Pettegree sets out in detail the fate of many European libraries and their contents in the course of the second World War, with books moved to safety, or burned, or purloined and scattered across the world - and he glances too at how such targeting has continued to the present day in Europe, in Bosnia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. It also contextualises the ubiquity of the book as an element in national rivalries: military libraries, for example, played an ever-greater role in the training of 19th-century European national armies. And today, of course, the creation or re-establishment of national libraries, frequently in striking new buildings, fulfils a vital function in nation-building, as a metaphor for societal pride, solidarity, and - if necessary - resistance.

Pettegree notes that Mao Zedong began his career as a librarian, and that his Little Red Book ran to more than a billion copies - but The Book at War is overwhelmingly a western history. Much, then, remains to be written about the books that circulate around the globe - but for now, Pettegree has reminded us of their frontline position in a world of perpetual conflict.