Historian/library scientist/writer Fred Lerner writes to tell us Continuum has just published the second edition of his book, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age.
In this fully updated edition, Lerner “continues to explore the ways in which men and women collect and organize the records of human experience. Updated to include our ever-expanding technology, Lerner describes the crucial role libraries played in ancient Egypt, Han-dynasty China, the ancient Western Classical world (the great library of Alexandria, which was lost to us in stages over many years), the Baghdad of Harun-al-Rashid, and medieval and Renaissance Europe. It continues with the libraries of colonial America, the Library of Congress, university libraries, and today’s large public library system.” The book is “a brief historical narrative, not an exhaustive statistical survey. This is a history of one of the most enduring of human institutions, one nearly as old as history itself.”
Lerner is also the author of A Bookman’s Fantasy: How Science Fiction Became Respectable, and Other Essays, which NESFA Press published in 1995. His first science fiction story, “Rosetta Stone”, appeared in the debut issue of Artemis Magazine.