So you thought libraries were staid, quiet places? “In Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles, the Harvard rare-books librarian tells the story of that peculiar institution, whose fortunes, since man first etched a symbol in stone, have been governed as much by mass uninterest and bureaucratic incompetence as by war and natural disaster. ‘Libraries are as much about losing the truth … as about discovering it,’ writes Battles, pointing out that much of what has survived through the ages is owing not to public institutions but to private collectors, who were better able to weather the tides of biblioclasm – the destruction of books – that have periodically swept the world.”