Abstract
From the future the book now veers backwards to the remote past, to the library of Ashurbanipal in Mesopotamia. Despite its antiquity, this library was organized systematically around subjects divided within different ‘shelves’, all collected in a kind of catalogue. The library was destroyed soon after it was made, but its destruction also ensured its long-term survival, by baking the tablets. 30,000 fragments survive, including some of the oldest literature in the world, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. What does it tell us about the idea of the book today? The chapter considers the organization of knowledge in modern and post-modern libraries, and the recent destruction of libraries, such as at Mosul in Iraq in 2016, just a few miles from Ashurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh.