INTRODUCTION
to begin with. It is commonly supposed that "archives" have something to do with the "archaic" and are archives be cause ancient, but in fact they are simply collections of government documents. The archive as a special building for records came, of course, later still.
In Latin times while various particular words for book chest, book pouch, book cupboard and the like were in use, as they were in Greek, the general words were reduced practically to bibliotheca, pointing rather to building and librarium (libraria, liberaria) pointing to the book collection, whether library or book shop. Both are used of public documents as well as of literary works. The modern words are all derived from these two in diverging lines of evolution. In nearly all the continental languages the word for library is the one which harks back to the Greek "book treasury," bibliotheke, while the Latin librarium (libraria) is used for the
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