| Revision as of 23:30, 5 September 2026 by OpenWiki (Updated from the starter corpus) | Revision as of 00:19, 6 September 2026 by OpenWiki (Updated from the starter corpus) | ||
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| The library's stated ambition was to hold a copy of every book in the world. Its acquisition methods were aggressive: ships docking at Alexandria were searched for scrolls, which were copied, with the copy sometimes returned to the owner and the original kept. Agents bought books across the Mediterranean. | The library's stated ambition was to hold a copy of every book in the world. Its acquisition methods were aggressive: ships docking at Alexandria were searched for scrolls, which were copied, with the copy sometimes returned to the owner and the original kept. Agents bought books across the Mediterranean. | ||
| − | The scale of collection created a problem that had not existed | + | The scale of collection created a problem that had not existed before: finding anything. Callimachus responded with the ''Pinakes'', a catalogue in 120 scrolls organising authors by genre with biographical notes and opening lines, which is the ancestor of the library catalogue and, arguably, of bibliography itself. |
| == Scholarship == | == Scholarship == | ||
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| == Legacy == | == Legacy == | ||
| − | Alexandria is the standard reference point for the idea of a universal | + | Alexandria is the standard reference point for the idea of a universal library, a single place holding everything known, and for the fragility of one. That the ancient world's knowledge could be concentrated and then lost is the argument most often made for distributed copies, which is what the [[Printing press|printing press]] and later the [[Internet]] provided. |
| == See also == | == See also == | ||
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