"We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth."

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

With a couple of hours in Manchester awaiting the arrival of a hen party lost somewhere on the way from London, I didn't make it out to the Manchester Museum to proffer Neb-Senu's statue a burger, but I did spend some time in the amazing John Rylands Library. 

I only had my ipad so the pictures aren't too hot, but if you want to think of the Unseen University coupled with Hogwarts and multiplied by the Jedi library, you're not far wrong. Go and check out my snaps of the shelves, stonework and lusciousness.  I would wholly expect to find among its shelves books never written, or yet to be written.

Post title quote is by John Lubbock, and taken from Turning the Page, newsletter of Friends of the Adamstown (PA) Area Library. It was found here.

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