Welcome to the Reading Room!

In The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco speaks of a library as a “place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

The goal of the Reading Room is to reawaken that long, centuries-old murmuring. Our bloggers will dive into the electronic archives of the Online Library of Liberty and bring you the most interesting pieces of the texts and images housed there. They’ll connect those things to each other, and to the discussions, texts, art, and popular culture of today. They’ll spark your curiosity, encourage you to dig more deeply, and keep you company while you drink your morning coffee.

We’ll bring you the beautiful, the unexpected, the wise, the witty, and sometimes the just plain unusual. We hope you’ll love what we find. And we hope you’ll share what you find with us, either in conversations about the posts, in letters to the editor, or in submissions of your own.

Welcome to the Reading Room. And please, talk in our library.