The Abbey Newsletter

Volume 13, Number 4
Jul 1989


People

"One preserves books not just out of an instinctive clinging to the artifacts of memory or solely because books have been the companions of democracy and spurs to dynamism in our society. We also keep books because they are the individual's portable, affordable link with the memory, mind, and imagination of the rest of humanity--a moral antidote, if you like, to the creeping passivity, parochialism, and shortened attention spans of our video culture."
-James H. Billington, speaking at the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association, 1988

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