Monthly column on the arts: Conan the Librarian?
Of books and millennia
The other week I was the guest of the Librarian's Christian Fellowship at Winchester, where I was to give the LCF annual lecture (on Knowledge in the IT age, a theme you may have heard me expand on before in these pages). The Fellowship had arranged for its members and guests to be entertained in the morning by a guided tour of Winchester Cathedral Library.
David Porter
Every time I go to Winchester - a mere half hour's drive from my home - I wonder why I don't go more often. After the guided tour I wondered why I had never visited the Cathedral Library before. The gift of a seventeenth-century Bishop who donated his large library to the diocese, it's housed in an ancient room built on to the Cathedral for that purpose. The books sit in stately rows on carved shelves, a pair of library globes that have sat in the room for centuries dominating the floor.
