History in folios.

Byline: F.S. Aijazuddin

LIKE other living organisms, libraries too die. They may survive for 700 years as Oxford's Bodleian Library has done, but even that venerable institution is succumbing to infirmity.

Readers of my last column complained that there had been omissions in my mention of libraries that had been vandalised or destroyed throughout history. They are advised to access Google where they will find a lengthy but even then incomplete list of libraries that are remembered only for their ashes. Alternatively, they might find an answer in the last time they themselves visited a library.

Anyone who has grown up without a book as a sibling has had a deprived childhood. The seeds of my library were sown in my head, when, at a young age, I went to sleep to the sound of a book being read to me. As a student in England, I had access to the local public library that offered a limited range of titles to locals with even fewer interests. Two books a week spread over three terms a year made me wiser beyond the school curriculum. This habit continued during my professional tutelage when, particularly after high-pressure exams, I read voraciously, my mind devouring everything. The mind, though, as the aphorism goes, is like the stomach. It is not how much it consumes that matters: it is how much it digests.

I have lost count of the number of books I have read, just as I cannot recall the quantity or quality of meals I have eaten. With sadness, though, over the past 50 years, one has seen libraries like the Liaquat National Library in Karachi gradually crumble and disintegrate in the cavernous Frere Hall. One has entered the Punjab Civil Secretariat library in Lahore, hopeful, only to discover that a light-fingered bureaucrat had years ago pilfered a precious tome. One has watched the Dyal Singh library in Lahore on Nisbet Road, Lahore, being suffocated gradually by motorcycle outlets. And one has mourned the extinction of owner-manned bookshops, where, for instance, the stock of books was stored in a loft and each desideratum would be thrown down to customers like a shoebox through an aperture in the ceiling.

Future bookshops will exist in another empyrean.

Future bookshops will exist in another empyrean, a virtual world where books will be images without substance. Gone the physical pleasure of holding a book or hearing the crackle of an ancient page or savouring the smell of a weathered leather binding.

Over a lifetime devoted to books, the...