The What’s Next: Top Trends Blog points to a really great quote from Happiness by Theodore Zeldin:
A library was a place that suggested the most perfect order, with every book allotted its exact place, and a record kept of its every movement, in and out, and yet a library eventually converts its readers to the view that the world is not in perfect order at all, that most things are increasingly difficult to understand, that no two books ever quite agree; it seemed designed to be a polite hint that the god Chaos is still very present in the universe, unveiling new forms of chaos all the time. ….visitors who spent long enough in her library would become connoisseurs of misunderstandings, not just of authors and readers misunderstanding each other, but of the universal dither, of how people changed their minds about what they meant, of how words were used in ways no one could make sense of….a library was very far from being a place where nothing happened, for in it the world was rearranged a million ways; rigidities dissolved, and reformed and dissolved again; a library was a great mountain of lies as well of truth.
Of course
The library is a three-dimensional representation of the collective human intellect. It is only natural that it reflects the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies of human knowledge and thought.