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                      THE BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES




[Illustration:

  A COLLECTION OF QUIPUS
  AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, N. Y.
  NOS. B 3453, 8704
]

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                                  THE

                        BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES


                                   BY

                       ERNEST CUSHING RICHARDSON

                   LIBRARIAN OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY


                       PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
                               PRINCETON

                        LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
                        OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

                                  1914




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                          _Copyright, 1914, by
                       Ernest Cushing Richardson_


                        PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1914

[Illustration]




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                                PREFACE


A considerable mass of memoranda on the early history of libraries has
been gathered by the author of this essay during the last twenty-five
years, and out of this material various essays have been published from
time to time on Antediluvian Libraries, Medieval Libraries, Some Old
Egyptian Librarians, etc. The fact that the unworked mass of modern
information through excavations is so great as to put off for a long
time still a systematic treatise, has led to the plan of publishing
these essays and addresses from time to time as completed and in uniform
style. Although written for very different audiences and in various
methods, each is an attempt to gather information not generally
accessible and to be, so far as it goes, either a contribution to
knowledge or to the method of knowledge, a sort of preliminary report or
investigation in the field, pending full and systematic report. The
nucle