Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian at Harvard and narrator, gives a colourful tour through the stacks from ancient times to the 21st century. Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved, but also controlled, inspired, shaped, hidden and obliterated knowledge. Battle's spirited journey takes the reader from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library, from socialist reading rooms and rural home libraries to the beginnings of the World Wide Web. Along the way, Battles explores not only how libraries are built but how they are destroyed, from the neglect and decay of Alexandria (and myth of its burning), to the burnings of scrolls in ancient China, to the destruction of Aztec books by the Spanish conquerors - and in our own time, the burning of libraries in Europe by the Nazis and by Bosnian Serbs in the Balkans.