Something Understood

Mark Tully celebrates libraries. From the famous to the obscure, libraries are dusty and mysterious, solemn and weighty, dull and boring, chaste and wickedly romantic. They have contained the collected wisdom of groups and nations, they have enabled the poor to climb out of their circumstances, the poet to survive penury, the revolutionary to plot and the theologian to speculate. But do they remain as important in the modern media age?