The Birmingham Free Libraries, the Shakespere Memorial Library, and the Art Gallery

Langford, John Alfred

ISBN 10: 0217233295 ISBN 13: 9780217233293

Verlag: General Books LLC, 2012

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871. Excerpt: ... THE BIRMINGHAM FREE LIBRARIES. "Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve, as in a violl, the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unlesse warinesse be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Booke; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit, imbalm'd and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." These are the noble and eloquent words used by John Milton when pleading to the Parliament of the Commonwealth on behalf of a free and unlicensed press. Such words rise naturally to the mind in thinking of large public libraries, and of the provisions which a few wise towns have made to supply the people with the free use of well-selected collections of the "pretious life-blood" of all the master spirits who have from the earliest to the latest times "imbalm'd and treasured up," their thoughts to "a life beyond life." The Birmingham Free Libraries have only been in existence a few years, and the historian of Free Town Libraries has already pronounced the Beference Library to be "really a library; and not merely a heap of books." Before, however, this great good was accomplished, those who advocated the introduction of the Act into the town had to suffer a defeat, and several years of agitation were nec...

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• Verlag: General Books LLC
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0217233295
• ISBN 13: 9780217233293
• Einband: Rústica
• Anzahl der Seiten: 32