Later in the eighteenth century, St. Gall entered a new golden era, not of book production but of book curatorship and display. The abbot engaged master builders and master craftsmen to construct a perfect home for all the books that had survived the perils of scissor-happy monks; squalid, moldy, wormy confinement in the basement of Hartmut Tower; the rescuing hands of papal secretaries from Tuscany; invasion and war in 926 and 1712; and the fires of 937 and 1418. Construction of the new library commenced in 1758 and lasted a decade.
