The conclusion asserts that a library is best understood as something fluid and potential in the same way that the books within it may also hold the potential to be objects. It points out that libraries have always contained other objects, such as medals and coins, and reminds the reader that the library space is a constructed one, not a neutral or inevitable one.

Using the library of eighteenth-century attorney and legal historian Frances Hargrave as a starting point, this chapter considers the place of law, property, and state formation in the causes and results of the American Revolution. Focusing on three related themes to the place of laws in independence – the influence and break from English legal culture, the pluralism of legal practice within North America, and the place of legal institutions in either maintaining or changing the status quo – this chapter considers how both different forms of property and the different individuals and communities involved with it played a central role in the creation of an independent United States. The governments that emerged from the Revolution each relied heavily on these varied legal threads.

Even in the worst conditions, Jews needed to hear music, read books, attend lectures, watch actors perform, and participate in a myriad of cultural activities in order to connect to prewar values and memories. This chapter highlights the extraordinary cultural production of Jews in situations from cramped, dangerous ghettos, to the worst possible extremes, concentration and extermination camps. Jews stressed how much cultural activity helped them retain their psychological integrity and resist Nazi attempts to dehumanize them.

On his death in 1703, Pepys left his library to his old college, instructing that it be preserved ‘for the benefit of posterity’. Among this collection was his diary. This chapter demonstrates that Pepys’s choice to save his journal was part of wider plans to shape the historical record. It was a response to the hostile political climate of the 1690s and to the types of histories then being written. Pepys was an expert in creating and controlling archives – his own and others. He intended his diary to be read alongside his naval records and in conditions that would secure it a sympathetic reception. Pepys’s collecting also shows he had an expansive sense of what (and who) might be worthy of future historians’ attention. What he termed his ‘scheme’ for his library’s future was, ultimately, a design on future readers and we need to factor this in when interpreting his records.

This chapter explores how readers who have chosen an e-book decide on their next step, contrasting the motivations for purchase (or conditional use license purchase), loan, and piracy. It draws on legal scholarship, book history, and fan studies to investigate how bookness and realness in the form of meaningful ownership can be constituted if desired, acknowledging that bookness and realness may be unwanted when readers prefer temporary, unauthorised, or unambiguously illegal uses. This recasts e-books as an integral part of building a personal library: sometimes as components, but sometimes just as tools. It concludes with evolving understanding of the rights of the reader and the fraught question of e-book control, and readers’ experiences of conflict with corporate entities over ownership of their collections. This further demonstrates how readers are able to move flexibly between conceptions of e-books as real books, ersatz books, and digital proxies.

Chapter 17 considers Goethe’s extensive collections, which ranged in subject matter from art and ethnography to natural history and scientific instruments, and also included a vast library. It uses the period around his Italian journey (1786–8), when his involvement with art and art objects was particularly intense, to highlight tensions within his approach to collecting which apply throughout his career as a collector. The chapter also addresses the complexity of classifying Goethe’s collections, owing to their scale and diversity, and to the variety of his own collecting habits.

This chapter samples signs of various cultural institutions, entertainment venues and media.

This chapter samples signs from educational institutions at various levels and a few school and government offices.

A survey and reconstruction of Collins’s library based on auction records leading to an analysis of his literary and historical interests, as well as his favourite authors

The epilogue surveys contemporary global fiction and alternate conceptions of world literature to stress the political, historical contingency of the Anglophone ambition to give formal literary expression to totality. Unlike their late modern predecessors, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delegate the task of crafting literary totalities to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a splendiferous Gesamtkunstwerk but in grazing across many national literatures. Recent trends suggest a privatization of world-making responsibilities; authors no longer claim the public function of rendering the world legible for their readerships, at least not within single works. I proceed from self-reflexive meditations on world literature in Calvino, Borges, and Adichie to explore the literary market in South Korea, where publishing houses have stayed solvent thanks to the evergreen demand for collectible sets of foreign literature in translation. Unlike the writers I examine in previous chapters, non-Anglophone writers frequently assume that the world is an entity to be read rather than written.

This essay provides insight into some of the content of Britten and Pears’s book collection. It draws attention to why certain volumes were used as the source material for various musical works. The essay also emphasises how friendships with writers, such as art historian Kenneth Clark and novelist and critic E. M. Forster, influenced key aspects of Britten and Pears’s lives: their passion for fine art and their faith in pacifism. This survey of the collection underlines why their books are often useful bases of information for biographical background about both musicians. Their library tells us stories about their childhoods and discloses their interests in topics ranging from classic English literature to gardening to the developing genre of gay fiction. Additionally, it adds context to fundamental aspects of their lives, such as their anti-war stance and their enduring commitment to one another.

Darius I overcame rebellions and seized the throne of Babylon, but cuneiform scholarship continued and developed; religious practices did not change, nor did the great buildings on the citadel. The zodiac scheme came into use. The Achaemenid king took Babylonian royal titles and promoted the worship of Marduk for local purposes. Xerxes broke the continuity. Following an uprising, a purge led to the ending of many archives. The province of Babylon was divided in two. Subsequent Achaemenid kings continued to treat Babylon with reverence. Alexander the Great defeated Darius III, entered Babylon, retained the Persian satrap, and moved treasure from Susa and Ecbatana to Babylon. He was recognized as a god. Lack of sons at his premature death precipitated a civil war from which Alexander’s commander Seleucus emerged to take the throne jointly with his son Antiochus. The derelict ziggurat was demolished, but temples and rituals, chronicles and astronomical diaries, continued as before. Aramaic was widely used, and fewer texts were inscribed in cuneiform. Interest in the fall of Assyria and of the Babylonian empire is apparent in Greek literature. Famous scholars include Berossus and named astronomers. Parthians invaded and eventually ended the dynasty.

Following unsuccessful attempts to keep the descendants of Nebuchadnezzar II on the throne, the usurper Nabonidus became king. Persian tribes had moved into Elamite lands, and the Medes made Harran a dangerous city; Nabonidus‘ mother, an aged acolyte of Ashurbanipal, resided there. His lengthy inscriptions are informative about his deeds and his character. He dedicated his daughter to the Moon-god at Ur according to precedent, and spent ten years in Arabia, leaving his son Belshazzar in charge in Babylon. He returned and restored the temple in Harran. Cyrus the Great brought his rule to an end, but continued to employ some high officials. Cyrus was probably of mixed Elamite and Persian descent. The Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform for a Babylonian audience, used traditional denigration of the previous king Nabonidus, and acknowledged Marduk as Babylon’s god. In another cuneiform text, Nabonidus was mocked for his scholarly pretensions and for sacrilegious acts. Babylon continued to be the centre where all subsequent kings felt obliged to celebrate the New Year festival to be accepted as legitimate rulers. Old monuments were not defaced. Cyrus may have been responsible for an imitation of Babylon’s glazed bricks at Persepolis. He made his son Cambyses co-regent.

Hard times for Babylon followed the end of the First Dynasty; but records of two Sealand kings, and the account of magnificent rebuilding of Marduk’s temple by a Kassite king imply wealth and energy. Glass production brought a new source of wealth, and horses were bred for chariots. Marduk was still the supreme god. The top status of the Kassite kings in Babylon was recognized by the pharaohs in Egypt. There cuneiform was used for international correspondence and Babylonian literature used to train local scribes. Foreign wives were taken from Elamite, Assyrian, and Hittite royalty. A top scribe from Babylon served in Assyria, and literature flourished. Boulders recording donations of land were carved with texts and celestial motifs. The office of eunuch is discussed. The Assyrian king raided Babylon, looting literary tablets among other valuables. He took over rule of Bahrain to access Gulf trade. The Kassite kings soon resumed the dynasty but the Elamite king raided and in turn took huge amounts of booty. In the next dynasty, the great Nebuchadnezzar I defeated Elam and wrote a heroic account. As a result of tribal incursions by Arameans, the Aramaic language began to spread, and camels trained for transport opened up desert trade. A library already existed in Babylon.

The transfer of the Cape to British control in 1806 gave the region new geopolitical prominence and the Cape sea-route more importance as the colonial authorities sought to consolidate control of the hinterland. British colonisers legitimated their presence in the region by insisting on their commitment to civilisation, progress, better governance and scientific accomplishment. This included conquest of the Xhosa, the British settlement programme in 1820, and scientific institutions. African kingdoms were also changing rapidly as they absorbed new military technologies such as horses and firearms. In the 1820s, a Royal Observatory was sited at Cape Town to expand knowledge of astronomy in the southern hemisphere and help with navigation and mapping. In the first half of the nineteenth century, scientific networks and associations gained footholds in local colonial society leading to the establishment of a natural history museum, the revival of the botanical garden and zoological expeditions. Geological exploration revealed fossils in the Karoo, prompting new thinking about the age of the earth. Flints and middens helped to catalyse archaeology as a field of interest – as did rock art. The science of race, which slip-streamed in Darwin’s wake, was given impetus by imperial conquest in South Africa.

Why would Clement showcase his participation in the Classical discourse of literary miscellanism when writing a project for the formation of Christians in late second century Alexandria? This chapter sketches Clement’s social context in order to bring light to his and his audience’s relationship to Classical tradition. Then it considers aspects of the Classical culture of miscellany-making and indicates how they were shared or transformed in Clement’s Christian setting. This encourages us to imagine how Clement and his audience could have taken delight in the rhetorical aesthetics of miscellanism and could have been attracted or impressed by the social and intellectual lifestyle within which it was cultivated, such that they sought to inhabit it and make it their own. Miscellanism was neither peripheral nor boring in the lives of imperial literary men, but it took people to the heart of the friendship circles, activities and institutions that framed and supported the culture of the pepaideumenoi, such as the library and the symposium.

This chapter falls into these related parts. The first deals with research: why it is different today than before, why a library is no longer essential, as well as the training of faculty members to become good researchers. Strong, relevant research is a key driver for marketing, and the Dean/President typically would play a key role here, above all by communicating effectively key research findings. The Dean/President is typically also critical in finding a reasonable balance when it comes to how much resources that is spent on research verses on marketing.

Keith Falkner’s invigorating significance for the RCM in the 1960s was no less than Hugh Allen’s had been in the interwar period. Falkner came to the College after a formative time at Cornell University in the United States, whose distinguished music faculty had introduced him to American musicology and early and contemporary musical repertoires. Falkner’s very individual ‘can do’ mindset encouraged him to challenge the RCM Council to raise the money the College needed, while his wide range of personal and musical sympathies made him very approachable to the RCM students. Falkner appreciated the potential of the RCM’s historic collections, while also being aware of the significant benefit of such technological developments as an electronic music studio. Under Falkner, the RCM’s library service was rationalized, and students were encouraged to perform outside the College. Falkner linked the RCM into the Association of European Conservatoires. He increased the range of subjects students could study, to include the guitar and Baroque instruments and the number of brass and woodwind students increased. Falkner took a robust attitude to improving professors’ pay.

Willcocks led by musical example, and his performances with the College orchestra and chorus helped the success of the Centenary appeal and raised the College’s profile. Willcocks was pleased for the College to undertake concerts of repertoire he had little interest in, as long as standards were high, and so early and contemporary performance flourished. The RCM Centenary was vigorously pursued across the College, and its success raised enough money for the new, integrated, library service, new social space and to build the Britten Theatre. The second Gulbenkian Report (1978) increased public awareness of the unfavourable funding of the conservatoires compared with universities. Relations with Whitehall continued to be difficult, but in Willcocks’s time the College was at last funded to pay its teaching staff on the national pay scales for other higher education institutions.