There were some great quotes and snippets of library history in this book, but eventually I realized that Manguel approaches libraries in a very old-fashioned way - very heavy on preservation and print books and silent reading rooms full of arcane collections like the Warburg Institute Library. I appreciate that kind of thing but it's SO far from my professional experience that I got a little tired of it.

And that whole Important History of Civilization business is more exclusive than he lets on - he laments the loss of potentially great work by ancient poets and doesn't seem to realize that even if we had every single word written by those people we wouldn't have a complete picture of human history.