Andrew Pettegree > Quotes

“uncomfortable truth of libraries throughout the ages: no society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations. What we will frequently see in this book is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artefacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows. The fate of many collections was to degrade in abandoned attics and ruined buildings, even if only as the prelude to renewal and rebirth in the most unexpected places.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“same battles were repeatedly replayed, marking out the library as a political space. Should readers in the new nineteenth-century public libraries have the books that they desired, or books that would make them better, more cultured people? This raging debate was still echoing deep into the twentieth century:”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“For libraries, from the time of Ancient Greece and Rome to the public library movement of the nineteenth century, had never simply been collections of books. They were also a public demonstrations of a society's values...”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict

“The promise of a social gospel was for Luther an irrelevant and ultimately irrelevant and ultimately cruel delusion.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Martin Luther was a thoroughly educated man but he wore this lightly. His sermons were littered with only examples and improving tales, drawing equally from the fables of Aesop and the follies of life he observed all around him.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Print, it transpired, was not just an instrument of agitation and change: now it was equally necessary to win the peace.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Yet when the ribbon was cut and the band had played, serious questions still had to be addressed. Who was the library intended to serve? Should children be admitted? What of those who saw the library mainly as a warm place to shelter while leafing through a newspaper? The issue was complicated by the fact that neither Andrew Carnegie, whose fortune funded a swathe of civic libraries across America and the United Kingdom, nor the British Public Libraries Act made provision for the purchase of books. These decisions lay in the hands of the”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Even humble comic books could not escape the new puritanism. In 1952, comics were removed from the on-board bookshops of the US Pacific Fleet, on the grounds that they were too violent and graphic for marines and sailors.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict

“It is often the parishioners, the men and women in the pews, who set the tone.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“University libraries, responding to student demand, are now social hubs as much as places of work, the cathedral silence that once characterised the library a thing of the past. In this, libraries actually hark back to an earlier model, pioneered in the Renaissance, when libraries were often convivial social spaces, in which books jostled for attention alongside paintings, sculptures, coins and curiosities.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“His plain, undecorated, and utilitarian work reeked week of provincialism.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“In Martin Luther's life and behavior is very courteous and friendly, and there is nothing of the stern stoic or grumpy fellow about him. He can adjust to all occasions. In social gathering he is gay, witty, ever full of joy, always has a bright and happy face, no matter how seriously his adversaries threatening him. One can see that God's strength is within him. – Petrus Mosellanus”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“How neglected and desolate everything looked,’ he wrote, plaintively: There was mould and rot everywhere, the debris of moths and bookworms, and a thick covering of cobwebs. The windows had not been opened for months, and not a ray of sunshine had penetrated through them to brighten the unfortunate books, which were slowly pining away: and when they were opened, what a cloud of noxious air streamed out.1”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“fissiparous multiplicity of faiths.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“the collection was unceremoniously removed to temporary warehousing, while an unspecified proportion of the books were simply dumped in landfill: some estimate 200,000 books, others half a million.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“The most successful ran a shop full of scribes turning out several dozen copies a week. These avvisi were succinct, wide ranging and remarkably well informed.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

“The flexibility of the compilation, the ability to create bespoke texts from segments of other works, was one of the key features distinguishing the manuscript book world from the age of print, where the order and nature of texts was established before they came into the hands of the purchaser. This loss of autonomy in the creation of books would be one of the major sources of regret among established collectors in the transition from manuscript to print in the fifteenth century.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“Here the owner’s intellect was stimulated not only by being surrounded by books, but other objects, including busts, vases, coins and a great variety of curiosities, especially antiquities”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“the launch of Penguin Books in 1935,”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“often finds a more interesting story behind the conventional one. Martin Luther's supposedly revolutionary resistance to indulgences took place in a German state where they were sold. Even more intriguing, they weren't sold because the ruling authorities there get a brisk business in holy relics – which Luther left alone.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“It is axiomatic in good library practice that a de-accessioning programme should never be undertaken during a major building project.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“The stranglehold of the departed was much resented by the new generation of aspiring authors. Which is why it is who did make the breakthrough were so admired.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“The opportunity to present a new concept of information technology, ideally with a shiny new building attached, often proves irresistible. Nowhere has this been more disastrously demonstrated than with the new library of San Francisco, a remarkable story of hubris, misjudgement and maladministration, all to build an architectural monument to the new digital age.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“The most lavish book owned by the noble classes was also one of the most ubiquitous: the Book of Hours,”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“The reaction against Dutch predatory capitalism that ignited the wars of the later seventeenth century was fuelled partly by Dutch success in colonising the international book trade.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age