The burning of Iraq’s National Library destroyed records of much of the country’s intellectual life. “Even if alert curators and librarians succeeded in moving significant numbers of books to safety, Baghdad’s most recent bibliographic losses are enormous. The National Library was the country’s copyright depository, like our own Library of Congress; as such it contained copies of all books published in modern Iraq. Although Cairo and Beirut are the traditional centers of Arabic publishing, Iraqis have long been recognized as great readers-and in the 20th century, particularly before Saddam Hussein took power, the country’s book trade flourished. But the library’s holdings reached back to long before the rise of the Ba’ath Party.”