The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.

The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enl…

To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of typesetti…

A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madames, greeting the punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs and then p…

What is more important in a library than anything else - is the fact that it exists.

There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural f…