Author’s Foreword (2023): The author has decided to present here (with only very light retouching) an essay from over thirty-five years ago. The extent to which the essay still contains important insights may be quite striking. One need hardly add that the main notion voiced in the essay — of viewing the library as a “traditional institution” — has become ever more attenuated over the decades. This central idea of the essay, which arose out of the author’s own relatively happy experiences with “the-library-as-refuge” in […]