Thread by @jeffjarvis

In a few minutes, @APettegree & @A_der_Weduwen will be discussing their new book here:
The Library: A Fragile History | LIVE from NYPL via @YouTube

Jane Kamensky asks the authors about collaborating on books (they've done 3 together). @APettegree is a generous scholar He is surprised there are not more cowritten books in the humanities (as in science). His partnership with @A_der_Weduwen has produced such impressive work.

.@APettegree said his one rule working with @A_der_Weduwen is that each accepts the track-changes made by the other with "no sulking." That is checking one's ego at the keyboard.

BTW, @APettegree & @A_der_Weduwen also direct the Universal Short Title Catalog, an awesomely ambitious effort to catalog all known books from Gutenberg to the end of the 17th century. @universalstc

.@A_der_Weduwen says that in the COVID lockdown and libraries -- about which they were writing -- shut, he and @APettegree depended heavily on used bookshops. Oh, yes, bookfinder.com has been invaluable to me.

"The greatest enemy of the public library is modernity," says @APettegree, for people want books of their time.

Fascinating point from the book: If the papyrus scrolls at the Library of Alexandria had not been copied every two centuries, they would have crumbled on their own. Scale was the Library's ambition and enemy.

Another neat bit from the book: When Nixon visited Alexandria, he asked to see the Library. But, of course, it was lost; it is not known even where it was. But that question spurred fund-raising to build a monument there.

So impressed with @APettegree's quest to catalog lost books, adding references to known books to the @universalstc -- from, e.g., old auction lists. I think I might find it too tragic.

I bought both the print and audiobook versions of The Library: A Fragile History.

.@APettegree says the modern library must be brave & invite readers back in to do things that might have little to do w/the book. We can say good-bye to the cathedral of silence instilled by Bodley without a great deal of sadness, he says. Yes, I love libraries as social spaces.

.@A_der_Weduwen says the modern library must emphasize browsing. I agree. We have lost browing with the fall of the bookstore; Amazon is not terribly good at it (surprising, for it could make good recommendations). So libraries need to be a means of discovery.

Always a joy when a moderator picks your question to ask. I asked one about lessons from the institutions made for curation and culling in print--editor, publisher, librarian--for handling the abundance of creation and speech the net gives us.

.@APettegree replies the @universalstc pays much attention to "ugly ducklings" that were not saved for posterity by authorities but that were important contemporaneously.

In my question, I quoted this wonderful line from Jean-Philippe de Tonnac: “Culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.”