Access to libraries as critical element of social justice

We walk past glass-shuttered shelves holding books about India’s prehistory, a translation of A.R. Krishna Shastri’s Vachana Bharatha and the library’s enviable collection of rare manuscripts and books. We flip open one, The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the Levant by the French traveller, botanist and linguist Jean de Thévenot, to find ourselves stumbling across an unfamiliar, now-forgotten letter — the archaic long ‘s’ written as ‘I’ — catapulting us to a time before it was discarded by most printers in the latter half of the 18th century.