"Only Fred Lerner's The Story of Libraries offers even a passing view of the splendors of the book and the library in other cultures. Imagine the glorious Syrian library of Banu Ammar with its 180 copyists, its fabulous pavilions and watercourses; not to speak of the quite miraculous-sounding public libraries of 13th-century Baghdad, open even to the poor. More than other books, Lerner's reminds us of the terrors that also lay in the textual past. He reminds us of the fragility of the word and the often marginal status of those places in which it is stored."--Los Angeles Times.