Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden review – the libraries we have lost

A third of the way into his rich and meticulous 3,000 year history of knowledge and all the ways it may be preserved (or not), Richard Ovenden casually mentions that he and his wife once had to clear the house of a family member – a job that involved deciding which letters and diaries should be saved, and which, ultimately, destroyed. As he notes, such decisions are taken everywhere, every day, with few consequences. But occasionally, the fate of such documents can have profound consequences for culture, particularly if the deceased person had a public life. Think of Byron’s publisher, John Murray, tearing up and then burning the manuscript of his memoirs at his house in Albemarle Street; of Philip Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, feeding his diaries, sheet by sheet, into a Hull University shredder.

At this point, I had to stop reading Ovenden’s book for a moment, to picture the author going through the dressing-table drawers of, say, his elderly aunt. I imagine this would be an oddly impressive sight, for by day he is Bodley’s librarian (the most senior position at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford). If there’s anyone you might want to read your love letters after your death, it’s probably him; as Burning the Books reveals on every page, not only is he careful, diligent and wise, he also knows what to leave out, and what to keep in – and it’s this quality, above all, that makes his book so remarkable. Its sweep is quite astonishing and yet, amazingly, his narrative runs to just 320 pages.

Francis Bacon described the creation by Sir Thomas Bodley of the Bodleian in the 1590s as “an ark to save learning from the deluge” – the deluge in question being the Reformation. Ovenden’s somewhat more diminutive ark, also written at a time of huge political and economic strife, attempts to save the concept of the library itself, something it achieves not through polemic – though his book comes with a handy, cut-out-and-keep five-point plea for their continued existence – but by telling stories. He begins with the library of King Ashurbanipal, the institution at the heart of the Assyrian empire, a realm already centuries old by the time the Greek historian Xenophon gazed at the spot in Mesopotamia where the ancient city of Nineveh had once stood (in the 19th century, 28,000 clay tablets were retrieved from what remained of this library, artefacts that represent a revolution in the documentation of knowledge). After this, he then leaps on, crossing continents, cantering through the centuries.

Here is John Leland, traversing Tudor England, enabling us to glimpse the contents of the monastic libraries shortly before they were destroyed by Henry VIII. Here is the burning of the library of Louvain University in 1914, in what is now Belgium, by the invading German army. And here is the National Library in Sarajevo, aflame for three days in 1992, due to incendiaries fired by Serbian militia. By learning what was lost, and how, and why, we come to see how vitally indispensable libraries and archives are; to grasp some, if not all, of the ways in which they inform and sustain us.

However, I was most forcefully struck by the way that history repeats itself. The burning of Sarajevo’s library took place less than 50 years after the end of the second world war, when the Nazis embarked on one of the most concerted eradications of books ever to take place (it’s chastening, to put it mildly, to read that a German librarian, Wolfgang Herrmann, was among those who compiled a helpful list of banned authors); and even now, the ruination goes on. The libraries of the Zaydi community in Yemen are a unique feature of its cultural life – Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam, has a long and open-minded intellectual tradition – and are currently caught in the crossfire of its grim civil war.

And then there are the national archives of modern Iraq, a significant part of which have survived, thanks in large part to the extraordinary heroism of Kanan Makiya, an expatriate academic whose “obsession” with them brought him first to store some of these records in his parents’ house in Baghdad, and then to ensure their removal to a safe place. This is a long, complicated story, but it’s worth reading. As Ovenden quietly notes, archives are central to social order, to the ordering of history, and to the expression of national and cultural identity. In the case of Iraq, a country still mired in chaos, they’re crucial, in particular, to understanding the rise and fall of the Ba’ath party – and thus, they offer, perhaps, some modicum of hope. One day, the Iraqis will have the time and space to ask the deepest questions about what befell their country between 1968, when the Ba’athists assumed power, and the present day. Some of the answers they need will surely be found in this miraculous collection, now housed in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California.

• Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden is published by John Murray Press (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15