The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

by Stuart Kells

The philologist Budaeus showed his commitment in a different way. When a servant rushed into his study to warn him that the house was on fire, Budaeus replied, “Tell my wife that I never interfere with the household,” and he went on reading.

The roots of the words “library” and “book” derive from different languages—liber is from Latin, while bece, buc, and boc are from the cluster of Germanic languages that includes Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English. Both roots, though, have similar meanings: liber is bark, bece beech wood.

As soon as people began writing things down, the properties and availability of book-making materials became intertwined with the history of books and libraries.

Around 1200 B.C., Rameses II assembled a great library of books that included all the principal book materials available in the Nile Valley. More than ten types of book were represented, among them volumes made from papyrus, palm leaves, bone, bark, ivory, linen, and stone.

In other lands and other times, books would also be made from silk, gems, plastic, silicon, bamboo, hemp, rags, glass, grass, wood, wax, rubber, enamel, iron, copper, silver, gold, turtle shell, antlers, hair, rawhide, and the intestines of elephants.

In the making of books, local availability long dictated what materials would be used, and to what extent; local abundance enabled abundant use. The banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates were heavy with clay, so Mesopotamian scribes naturally used it to make their books.

In China, long before Europe, paper was made in large quantities from the abundant bamboo and the by-products of everyday life.

animals had given much in the history of the book, and they would give much more still. Parchment is made by washing and stretching a split skin and rubbing it smooth.

As Lewis Buzbee noted in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, twenty skins might be needed to make a small book, “but you could eat the leftovers. And yes, that’s why a diploma is called a sheepskin.”

A 1,000-page Bible, for example, needed 250 sheep.

The largest surviving medieval manuscript, the Codex Gigas or Devil’s Bible, is thought to have been made from the skins of 160 donkeys.

Quality issues always loom large when using animal hides, especially those of wild animals. Kangaroo skins, for example, have been used for bookbinding, but their quality is notoriously variable. Male kangaroos have long, scraping claws. Raw roo leather often arrives scratched and scored with what are known in the leather trade as “mating marks.”

In the Middle Ages, scribes sometimes had to work with parchment that was similarly holed by wounds or insects. Some blemishes were repaired with silk thread, other...

Vellum, the most deluxe and tragic form of parchment—made from the skin of bovine fetuses—is smooth, white, and highly workable.

When Tim Munby was librarian at Cambridge University’s King’s College, he co-owned a 1925 type 40 Bugatti, “which was regularly taken to pieces by the roadside.” On one trip, when one of the car’s gaskets kept blowing, Munby had a few of his own rare manuscripts to hand. After a process of experimentation, the gasket turned out to respond to vellum. An old antiphonal that had been ruined by water was cut up and put to use,

Scholars have noticed a relationship between the availability of writing materials, the vibrancy of literary activity, and the growth of libraries.

When Athens imported large quantities of Egyptian papyrus, a flood of Athenian literary work followed and the city’s libraries prospered. Those libraries, such as the great research collection formed by Aristotle for the Lyceum (c. 335 B.C.), were the location for two important beginnings: the inception of Western scholarship, and the creation of architectural features—spaces for reading, writing, and conversing—that distinguish all subsequent academic, monastic, and public libraries through the classical era to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.

(Conversely, a second-century Ptolemaic embargo on Egyptian papyrus exports caused difficulties for writers and readers throughout the classical world.)

In early Christian times, increased supplies of parchment—favored as a more reliable alternative to papyrus—made possible the monastic output of codices. Along with printing, the greater use of paper in the sixteenth century underwrote the spectacular literary output of Elizabethan England.

The libraries were modest storerooms, containing tens of thousands of square and rectangular clay tablets, each one about half the length of a tjurunga stone, each one covered with markings. The tablets were carefully organized on shelves and in trays. Tablet rooms at Ebla, Mari, and Uruk are examples of these simple libraries.

The script was so complex that some of the first modern archaeologists denied it was a script at all. In Hyde’s 1700 book on Persia, for example, the double professor confessed he regretted the survival of the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis because they were a triviality, “likely to waste a lot of people’s time.”

Today, not only can we understand the writing, we can even pronounce the words, more or less as they were spoken thousands of years ago.

In the twentieth century, the earliest Albatross and Penguin paperbacks were color-coded by genre. In contrast, the first clay tablets were shape-coded: square for financial accounts, round for farming records, and so on. Some featured both text and images, making them the first illustrated books.

Each one of a group of Assyrian tablets, now in the British Museum, was encased in a clay shell. Readers could only access the tablets by breaking the shells—the very first book covers—like walnuts.

The libraries of the ancient world—patrician, official, scholarly, domestic—stored their scrolls in chests, niches, and hatbox-like containers known as capsae. One of these is shown in a beautiful fresco at Herculaneum, near Pompeii. Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri is an example of the scroll libraries that were common in ancient Rome.

Much is known about how scrolls were produced, and about who did what in the production process. The librarii copied the author’s manuscript; the librarioli ornamented the copies and supplied titles and other ancillary matter; and the bibliopegi bound the copies by evening up the margins, squaring the ends, polishing the blank sides with pumice, and attaching wooden rods (taller than the scroll was wide) to each end—these aided rolling and reading, and helped protect the scroll from damage.

The library’s bibliothekai or bookshelves were probably set in recesses along a wide covered passageway. The precise layout of the collections is uncertain, but the Italian classicist and historian Luciano Canfora surmised, “Every niche or recess must have been dedicated to a certain class of authors, each marked with an appropriate heading.”

While in reality most of the texts obtained by the library were Greek, it did succeed in gathering substantial numbers of books from India, the Near and Middle East, and elsewhere in the Alexandrine world—books that represented a multitude of philosophies and creeds.

Discovered in 1849 by the amateur archaeologist and adventurer Henry Layard, the royal library at Nineveh was an attempt by King Ashurbanipal to collect all available knowledge in one place. The Ptolemies picked up where Ashurbanipal left off.

Despite the labels on the outside of Alexandria’s scrolls, readers struggled to find specific volumes—there were just too many books. A solution, though, was at hand. The famous poet and teacher Callimachus of Cyrene would help keep the books in order, and help scholars navigate through the collections. In other words, he would be a librarian.

The site was an ancient rubbish dump. Like other landfill found there, the manuscripts span the first six centuries A.D. They include thousands of Greek and Latin books and documents. Dating from the second century and written in a careful uncial script, the anonymously authored fragment 1241 is “a characteristic product of the Alexandrian erudition which exercised itself in antiquarian research and tabulation.”

Thanks to this and other sources, we know not only the names of the first half-dozen librarians—such as Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristophanes of Byzantium—but also their duties and achieve-ments—Callimachus was responsible for the library’s catalogue, for example.

To expand the great library’s famous collections, the authorities at Alexandria adopted a famous policy. Whenever a ship arrived at the city’s port with scrolls on board, the scrolls were taken to the library for copying. When the copying was finished, the new facsimiles were returned to the ship, and the originals stayed in the library.

Alexandria’s assertive collections policy seems to have been applied in other ways, too. When the library borrowed the works of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus from Athens in order to make copies, the copies rather than the originals were sent back to Greece. Once Alexandria became notorious as a book moocher, other cities and libraries refused to lend their books unless the Ptolemies staked large security deposits.

Established in 1537 by the Ordonnance de Montpellier, “legal deposit” prevented printers and publishers from selling a book unless a copy was given to the royal library at the Château de Blois. The law covered all new books, regardless of their size, cost, genre, or language.

Through a private agreement with the Stationers’ Company, Sir Thomas Bodley established England’s first legal deposit scheme in 1610. The company agreed to send to the Bodleian Library “a copy of every book entered in their Register on condition that the books thus given might be borrowed if needed for reprinting, and that the books given to the Library by others might be examined, collated and copied by the Company.”

Tellingly, he reprimanded the University Librarian, Thomas James, for cataloguing many “idle bookes and riffe raffes” unworthy of the Bodleian. In 1662 the scheme was extended to the Royal Library and the Cambridge University Library, and these collections too obtained much “riffe raffe.”

With such a concentration of books and scholarship, Alexandria was naturally home to spectacular achievements in medicine, astronomy, and geometry. Eratosthenes worked out ninety-nine percent of the circumference of the Earth. Archimedes worked out 99.9 percent of pi. In the history of Western thought, the library came to rival Athens as an intellectual powerhouse.

Not far from Alexandria’s perilous red-light district, the city’s merchant quarter hosted a boisterous array of booksellers.

They survived on several rackets, one of which was to bribe the librarians to remove scrolls from the collections; the scrolls were then copied, and the booksellers sold the piratical versions locally and abroad.

A class of para-literary workers on the fringes of the library produced forgeries, then collaborated with the booksellers to distribute them, and, often, to sell them to the library.

Apocryphal Aristotelian treatises were a favorite, and were produced to a convincingly high standard. Only after centuries of subsequent research were they proven to be bogus.

Posing as an Athenian contemporary and confidant of Thucydides, the scholar Cratippus wrote Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid, “in which he made happy use of bombast and anachronism.”

This style of work, parasitically piggy-backing on the reputation of a valued author, would become a staple of fraudulent publishing in the early-modern era and well into the Enlightenment. Names as famous as Shakespeare, Johnson, and Swift would appear on books cobbled together by opportunistic and anonymous authors.

The Great Library of Alexandria flourished for three centuries, or perhaps as many as nine—from around 300 B.C. to 642 A.D.—no one knows for sure.

Papyrus is a terrible material for preserving texts. Without a large and unwavering commitment to conservation and copying, a library of papyrus scrolls will readily and unceremoniously disintegrate—especially in the damp conditions of a river delta. Alexandria’s library might have just faded away.

In Greek drama alone, the losses were devastating: 83 of Aeschylus’s 90 plays were lost, along with 62 of Euripides’s 80, and 113 of Sophocles’s 120. Some books, though, including those backstreet bootleg copies, found their way into collections in Greece, the Levant, and especially Constantinople. Today, the editions pirated by booksellers account for a high proportion of the surviving texts from Alexandria.

In turn, that tradition passed to the great libraries of Constantinople—the Imperial, Patriarcha, and University libraries—which maintained it for another thousand years. Though scholars at those libraries produced little that was new or creative, they edited, annotated, and elucidated the standard classical texts, thereby guarding them for the future.

By sea and by land, along trade routes and pilgrim routes, the books and texts from Constantinople fed Eastern and Western monasteries and other public and private collections such as the papal library, the Ambrosian, and the Laurentian. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire elevated Rome, Milan, and Florence as centers of classical learning.

Ultimately, books and texts from Constantinople nourished the world. The histories of humankind’s libraries are intricately interwoven. Occurring over millennial time frames, the interlibrary movement of books and ideas marked out nonlinear trails of study, editing, translation, exchange, innovation, and appropriation—tracks that are just as arcane and marvelous as the sacred songlines of ancient Australia.