The Library Dreams of Knowledge's End

By: Matthew Battles

Here’s a short film that captured my fancy, discovered via Twitter architecture maven @twiliteprincess: Alex Roman’s “Kahn’s Library,” which features the 1965 Phillips Exeter Academy Library designed by Louis Kahn. As a modernist interior the […]

Read This Post

The Manuscript of Belz

By: Matthew Battles

THE LIBRARY IS collapsing on itself, trying to digest itself. Renovation has turned the whole place into a vast construction site, where tradesmen build temporary walls surrounding temporary walls surrounding temporary walls, ad-hoc postindustrial labyrinths […]

Read This Post

I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully

By: Matthew Battles

BEFORE THE TURN of the millennium when the Web was new, I worked in the bowels of Harvard’s Widener Library. There was as yet no Twitter, no Facebook, no YouTube; blogs and wikis were the […]

Read This Post

The Bibliophallic Urge

By: Matthew Battles

Hardcore anti-legend and bibliophile Glenn Danzig talks about his library, which seems to be located in a grotto bathed in the glow of bioluminescent aquatic creatures. His bookishness calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges, who […]

Read This Post