Fire, flood and warfare: all took their took on the accumulated cultural heritage of the first age of print. The National Library of Copenhagen was burned down in 1728. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed he Royal Library o Portugal. The Public and University Library in Strabourgh was destroyed by German bombardment in 1870, despite promises that it would be spared. It was subsequently restocked through the donation of duplicates from German olibraries, which accounts for the largely Germanic character of its early printed collections Today

. . . .Collections in northern France suffered severe damage in the Great War of 1914-18, but nothing in comparison to the impact of aerial bombing in 1939-45. Victims of the conflict included the National Library of Belgrade, the Polish National Library and all the major libraries of Warsaw. The fighting in Italy destroyed more than twenty libraries, including the library of Naples University and the Public Library in Milan, in the intense fighting of the last years o the war many German universities lost their entire collection. Urban communities under bombardment could sometimes save their most precious manuscripts but seldom their printed books. The precious items moved to places of safety suffered further depredations and depletions in the chaotic period after Germany's defeat. The combined impact of Nazi looting and the appropriation of German collection in what became Communist Eastern Europe led to an enormous churning of library stock. Discovering what became of many early books is a continuing task ever now, s of the Berlin State Library, formerly one of the greatest of all collections, annotates many of its books with the cautious formula 'possibly lost in the war': hey simply do not know. Certainly some Berlin books are i Cracow, and the other in Saint Petersburg.

The destruction of the Second World War was so great that we can scarcely be surprise that mny millions of old books were among its accidental victims. But sometimes destruction is more deliberate: as when libraries are targeted as repositories of a national cultural heritage. Between 1933 and 1945 it is estimated that the Nazi regime and it occupying troops destroyed as many as one hundred million books in Germany and occupied Europe. These may now seem like distant historical events, but the deliberate destruction of the National Library of Bucharest in the Romanian Revolution of 1989 and he destruction of National and University Library of Bosnia in Sarajevo in 1992 occurred in very recent times. The occupation of Baghdad in 2003 was followed by wholesale looting of both the National Library and the national Museums of Iraq. The cultural consequence are still incalculable.

These terrible events have caused a cumulative attrition of the cultural legacy of the first age of print. Books that survived many hardships to reach the apparent safe heaven of a major library perished in very recent times. We will never know quite what we have lost. But the chronicle of destruction is a bitter-sweet testimony to the power of books. Books preserve the accumulated, layered knowledge and wisdom of the human mind, wi all its twists and turns, ignorance and false steps. For this reason books will always be loved, but also feared. ~ Page 331/332