Why the Ralston College Library?
News 8th October 2026 David Butterfield
“Without libraries, what have we?” the author Ray Bradbury once asked. His answer was simple but devastating: “We have no past and no future.”
There is no better way to orient ourselves in the present than to stand before the accumulated literature and culture that has shaped the civilization we inhabit. Libraries, more than anywhere else, provide an awe-inspiring manifestation of curated knowledge, a physical reification of the words worth reading and the ideas worth considering. In our age of AI, when more information is being hoarded and guarded by companies that place private profit ahead of public education, the defense of the physical library is more urgent than ever.
It's long been a cliché that we live in the digital age. Indeed, screens are an unavoidable part of our daily lives, and they do bring some benefit: the instant interaction between people worldwide, and the access to almost infinite information, have been both world-changing and life-changing. But the downsides of living off binary code are very real too: the online landscape is unfathomable in scale and largely unfiltered in content; not only is there no clear route through the welter of material, but there is no obvious goal. It is a shifting and chaotic landscape, as unfocused as it is unfeeling. Worse still, the drive of apps to capture maximal attention from each customer creates closed feedback loops of the same content repackaged: algorithms spiral in vicious circles to constrain each user’s freedom.
By contrast, the physical book is stable and unmediated; its contents are fixed, its message clear. There is something profound in the very tangibility of holding that knowledge in your hands and in its most potent form. For the book is the product of a long chain of technological evolution: from clay tablet to papyrus scroll to parchment codex to printed paper book, it has improved with each iteration. But it has since regressed. For all the convenience and uncostliness of the e-book, it takes from the reader three of the best things about the conventional book: the physical sense of contact with its contents, the carefully-honed and beautiful interaction of text and illustration, and the freedom to read entirely on your own terms. The physical book allows focus on its pages and on nothing else. It brings separation from the screens that fill most of our waking hours, and from the dictatorial rule of wifi connection and battery life, thus allowing for intimate immersion into the joys of the text.
The long arc of the humanities does not propagate itself passively. As the very word “tradition” reveals in Latin traditio is the process of trans-dare, to “hand over”, it needs to be passed on , and taken in hand by another. Simply put, the book is the best vehicle ever invented for passing that torch from one human to another, across space and time. It can bridge and connect civilizations effortlessly: when Petrarch discovered the lost letters of Cicero in 1345, he thought it perfectly natural to sit down and compose a letter to the Roman orator who lived fifteen centuries earlier, chiding him for the evidence in his private letters that he failed to live up to the virtues his public works endorsed so enthusiastically.
Yet books are not immune from destruction. All of the great libraries of antiquity – at Alexandria, Pergamum, Ephesus, and the Palatine Library in Rome – came to a sorry end, the great majority of their books destroyed by both human and natural forces. And the processes by which manuscript books survived from the ancient world, through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, before reaching the welcome harbor of printed text, are both complex and fascinating. Many works were recognised to be of canonical importance: copies proliferated in the Greco-Roman world and stayed high up the list of what books new libraries would seek to have on their shelves. But Fortune is a fickle curatrix, and some of the greatest works of Antiquity – Homer’s Margites, many of Aristotle’s primary works, Cicero’s Hortensius, Caesar’s Oedipus, Ovid’s Medea, perhaps even Socrates’ verse fables – have been irrevocably lost. By turns, many ancient works which struggle to keep up, in literary and intellectual terms, with their more famous brethren have somehow managed to survive the choppy medieval period.
Books are not just conveyors of others’ words; they are individual physical entities that have lived their own lives. A copy that has passed between many hands over several centuries has its own tales to tell: bookplates, marginalia, inserted slips of paper reveal that the book has been in dialogue with its multiple owners, part of an ever dynamic relationship with human minds.
Only to the idle or jaded observer is a library just a place to store books, a passive repository for published work to find stately repose. This is the sort of stunted and stultified thinking that imagines that libraries have to be quiet – shhh, stranger! – in order to do their job properly. Instead, libraries should be the space where the intellect lives, where discussion thrives. Since open-ended, curious-minded conversation lies at the very heart of Ralston’s academic life, it needs a library to play the natural host.
A library space should uplift, and in no sense constrain, the visitor. The truest libraries welcome you in with open stacks: there is no administrative intermediary between reader and shelf, so the genuinely liberatory act of browsing comes into its own. While “browsing” is a misnomer for the 21st-century internet – since we see only what we have searched for, or what an algorithm decides to churn up – it is the perfect verb for the library. Such a collection will teach over and above the narrow scope of our present knowledge, setting before our gaze myriad books, and even many subjects of whose very existence we were entirely unaware. And it is the unexpected, serendipitous discovery that can change lives.
The best of library spaces allow for other uses still. They can be the perfect venue for the full range of intellectual and artistic gatherings, all the while watched over by the books who inspired that culture – a chorus of worthies in eloquent silence.For T.S. Eliot “the very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.” For us at Ralston, we are not just staking our own claim on that future, but shaping the students who will give it the steer which only deep and devoted immersion in the tangible past can give.
If you are interested in helping us build the Ralston College Library, you can make a gift directly through our giving portal and designate your support to the Library.
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Education and conversation free from censorship, cynicism, and corruption matter. Ralston College is a place for them to happen, for human flourishing and building anew.