Inmates

Trinity College Library in Dublin (from: Flatrock)

"Arthur Goldschmidt, a Leipzig dealer in animal feed and an exporter to South America, was more passionate about books than business. His private collection numbered 40,000 carefully indexed volumes and he engaged a librarian to take care of it.

     After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Goldschmidt was persecuted as a Jew; his assets were liquidated and his company confiscated. For survival, he sold his treasured collection of 2,000 almanacs — spanning three centuries — for a pittance to the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar. He fled in 1938. His grandson Tomas Goldschmidt, who was a toddler when Arthur died in poverty in Bolivia in 1951, had no idea the collection had survived until he was contacted by the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe — 70 years after his grandfather’s escape. The commission traced him at the request of the Duchess Amalia Library in Weimar.'
— Catherine Hickley, Bloomberg
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"A warehouse is being constructed to house the books that no one's reading.
     'The warehouse is extraordinary,' the Guardian writes, 'because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants.' [Those fringes are outside London.]
     'When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place.'
     The building's temperature will be regulated. It will be sealed against moisture. It will hold copies of books that no one actually cares about. Indeed, this is where unwanted books 'will go to serve their life sentences in a secure environment,' the Guardian explains, 'thanks to the grace of the provisions of the 1911 Copyright Act [UK] and later government legislation.'
 — Geoff Manaugh, Flatrock
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