Libraries of the Mind

""A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"" ""Libraries exist as physical things, but they also have a second form as abstract ideas about how we should organize and preserve information. In this philosophical but accessible book, Marx shows how better understanding our invisible libraries allows us to rethink our relationship to literature, culture and the forces that threaten both."" * The Washington Post * ""Renew that library card. This deftly written book reflects on the history of how we organize knowledge, classify books, and give meaning to our lives through reading. . . . An eloquent plea for reading by a true scholar of world literature."" * Kirkus Reviews * ""Absolutely packed solid with provocative ideas that will . . . offer you new ways of thinking and articulating the way you think of reading and storing what you’ve learned from your adventures with literature.""---Terry Potter, The Letterpress Project ""Libraries of our homes and minds can now more easily than ever include literature translated from myriad languages. Such broader reading enhances our capacity for valuing beauty and wonder not only in literature but in the world all around. Awareness of this reality—that there are many more beautiful books than we could ever read—perhaps heightens the pressure to read well and choose wisely. But in the age of AI and everything digital, it is also a beautiful reminder that to read is human.""---Nadya Williams, Providence ""A curious little book. . . . Every person should have a library of his own, Marx says, one in the mind, which is the first tool of intellectual growth and flexibility, not to mention an escape from parochialism.""---Mark Bauerlein, First Things ""[Libraries of the Mind] is that rare volume on libraries and classification systems that reads simultaneously as an erudite philosophical treatise and a page-turning thriller. . . . Essential."" * Choice * ""[A] sustained and more than interesting reading.""---David Marx, David Marx Book Reviews ""It would be futile to try to list the riches of Marx’s infinitely expandable and debatable little book. Its various lines of inquiry browse and sift material culture, the individual subconscious and collective unconscious, the self-serving political appropriation of values and fetishized concepts, or yet a cultural history of the different ways, always incomplete, in which the many elements, semantic, emotional, visual, etc., woven together by a subject form the 'mental image of works.'""---Didier Coste, Migrating Minds