More commonly known as the Library of Alexandria, it was a great learning center in Alexandria, Egypt and was one of the largest libraries of the ancient world. It's exact history muddled by the fact that it's existence began around the third century B.C. and no documents remain because it was destroyed by a massive fire around the third century A.D. During the height of its existence it was the center of learning with the optimistic objective of collecting all the knowledge in the world.
The library was housed in many buildings including lecture halls, meeting rooms, a reading room and a shared dining room. It was a research center with gardens and walks and is said to have influenced the layout of university campuses today. The method of filling its shelves with books, which were largely in the form of scrolls, was an aggressive campaign of collecting books off every ship that came into its port.
The library comprised a Peripatos walk, gardens, a room for shared dining, a reading room, lecture halls and meeting rooms. However, the exact layout is not known. This model's influence may still be seen today in the layout of university campuses. The library itself is known to have had an acquisitions department (possibly built near the stacks, or for utility closer to the harbour), and a cataloguing department. The hall contained shelves for the collections of scrolls (as the books were at this time on papyrus scrolls), known as bibliothekai. Carved into the wall above the shelves, a famous inscription read: "The place of the cure of the soul".
The first known library of its kind to gather a serious collection of books from beyond its country's borders, the Library at Alexandria was charged with collecting all the world's knowledge. It did so through an aggressive and well-funded royal mandate involving trips to the book fairs of Rhodesand Athens [5] and a (potentially apocryphal or exaggerated) policy of pulling the books off every ship that came into port. They kept the original texts and made copies to send back to their owners. This detail is informed by the fact that Alexandria, because of its man-made bidirectional port between the mainland and the Pharos island, welcomed trade from the East and West, and soon found itself the international hub for trade, as well as the leading producer of papyrus and, soon enough, books. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
Guardian Cats
and the Lost Books of Iskandriyah
The Library of Alexandria (Iskandriyah)
The city of Alexandria was home to the great Library of the same name. I chose the Arabic 'Iskandriyah' because it was more exotic and I love the way it sounds.
I love the images that the Alexandrian Library evokes. I imagine a place where people gather because they are so darn curious about everything. No one forces them to come and study and there is almost limitless resources at their disposal.
Everyone in my visionary library loves learning. Many of them love to talk and share their ideas. Others simply sit in silent absorption of a good book. In my library you may sit for hours reading undisturbed, or stroll through the gardens, stroking one of the Guardian cats that meander through.
There are buildings for lectures and discussions, great halls where scribes work, preserving parchments, scrolls and new book forms that are being developed.
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The mystery surrounding the destruction of the historical library allowed me to create my own version of what happened. Although the setting for my book is contemporary, the legends of the tragic fire that destroyed the ancient library created the perfect springboard for the Guardian Cats' story.
Of course some time travel back to the Library might be necessary for the apprentice guardian's training.
