The West African city near the great bend of the Niger River, at the southern edge of the Sahara, that became for centuries one of the Islamic world's foremost centers of trade and scholarship — where caravans exchanged gold for salt and where family and institutional libraries held tens of thousands of manuscripts — even as its name in the West became a byword for the unreachable ends of the earth.
For centuries Europeans used the word "Timbuktu" to mean the farthest imaginable place — somewhere so remote it might not be real. When a young French explorer finally reached it in 1828, he found not a city of gold but a quiet town of mud-brick houses on the edge of the desert. The disappointment told more about the dreamers than the place. The real Timbuktu had never been a fantasy. It had been a working city of merchants and scholars, and in its homes sat libraries full of books that the men chasing gold never thought to open.