The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

by Stuart Kells

The Medici librarian Antonio di Marco Magliabecchi was renowned as a literary glutton who possessed a memory “like wax to receive and marble to retain.” According to Holbrook Jackson, author of Anatomy of Bibliomania, Magliabecchi “lived in a cavern of books, slept on them, wallowed in them”;

anyone with a single bed, standard size, and paperbacks, standard size, will discover that seventy-seven can be accommodated per layer under the mattress.

The days of scroll libraries, though, were always numbered. As a surface for writing, parchment is demonstrably superior to papyrus. More tolerant of folding and of damp, it is also easier to obtain and therefore harder to monopolize.

Unlike papyrus scrolls, sheets of parchment will happily take ink on both sides.

The reader can jump to a chapter or passage without manually scrolling through nine meters of papyrus. Codices also suit reference guides such as contents pages, indexes, and page numbers—guides that are practically useless in scrolls.

Starting in 1978, Australian and North American archaeologists excavated the Dakhleh Oasis in the Sahara. They found an accounts book that dated from the fourth century. The book has been called the earliest complete example of a codex.

Another proto-codex in the classical era was made with sheets of papyrus, stabbed and laced at one end. Cicero, in his Epistles to Atticus (56 B.C.), suggested that papyrus sheets may also have been glued into codex form.

The first recognizably modern codices, with strong and flexible parchment pages, did not arrive until around 100 A.D., or perhaps a little later. That model was perfected over subsequent centuries until, probably in an early monastic workshop, an inventive binder fastened gatherings of parchment leaves to cords and (crucially, for strength) to each other.

C. S. Lewis remarked that the codex was one of the two most important innovations of the so-called Dark Ages. The other was the stirrup.

In Roman times, shortly before the Christian era, the growing use of desks led writers to prefer square sheets of parchment, which in turn were well suited to the codex format. The intimate relationship between furniture design, book formats, and library layouts would persist over the next 2,000 years or so.

In the Middle Ages, most of Europe’s libraries were attached to cathedrals and monasteries, and most ecclesiastical and monastic books were codices.

Reading and copying came together as the basis for the great tradition of monastic scriptoria, in which books were painstakingly copied and decorated.

Many scribes in the classical world were slaves.

The tradition of elaborate, exuberant pictorial frontispieces and initials arose in this spirit of individual creativity. Even the most senior priests participated in manuscript production. The very act of carefully copying out texts by forming each stroke and each letter by hand was itself an act of observance and devotion.

“Illuminated” manuscripts were the height of the medieval scribe’s art. Illumination refers to the use of elaborate decoration—initial letters, frontispieces, marginal decoration—and rich colors such as red, purple, lapis lazuli, and especially silver and gold.

The talented and inventive monks created enchanting images, sometimes with microscopic precision. Rabbits, cats, and mice frolicking and murdering each other in the margins. Intricate lacework patterns that explicitly recall the masterpieces of Celtic enamelwork. Cartoonish caricatures and drolleries with startling vitality. Despite many tragic losses, thousands of painted manuscripts have survived to the present day.

The initial page of the Gospel of St. Luke features 10,600 dots of red lead: these alone would’ve taken the illuminator at least six intently focused hours to apply.

Eadfrith introduced deliberate errors into his designs: an interlocking pattern of the wrong color, a bird lacking its wing, and so on. These have been interpreted as a way to stop just short of perfection—because perfection was the preserve of the Creator.

For almost 1,000 years, Europe’s libraries held almost nothing but Bibles, church-sanctioned religious tracts, and selected classical works of science and philosophy that were accessible only to a privileged class. A typical Christian monastery possessed fewer than one hundred books.

The Italian monastery of Bobbio was an exception. Founded by Irish monks, it housed 666 manuscripts in the tenth century—still a very modest number compared to the libraries of classical times, and compared to the myth, popularized in fiction and film, of the extensive medieval library. In 1200, the “large” medieval library at Durham—equally exceptional—numbered only 570 volumes.

Some large libraries did flourish in the middle of the Middle Ages. Those libraries were in the Arab world and the Far East.

In the year 1011, Korean monks founded the Tripitaka Koreana—a library of over 80,000 immaculate woodblocks for printing a complete set of the Buddhist scriptures.

In medieval Christian libraries, the first codices were kept in chests and on lecterns rather than in bookcases.

Whenever a medieval scholar wished to consult a book, he or she could know which book was which by its size, shape, color, and placement. (Book spines in the infinite Library of Babel are labeled, but with random letters unconnected to the books’ contents except by chance.)

Typically, monastic codices were much larger than run-of-the-mill modern books. The heaviest book at the Benedictine monastery of St. Gall weighed 22.5 kilograms.

Size added legibility and grandeur, but was also a way of preventing theft. In an 858 A.D. letter to Archbishop Hincmar, Lupus of Ferrières explained why he’d been reluctant to send a copy of Bede’s Collectanea: the book was too large to conceal on one’s person or to hide in a bag and, even if it could be, “one would have to ...

In the late Middle Ages, as the number of books grew, they began to be shelved standing up, alongside each other, on bookshelves. To accommodate this new arrangement, books had to be made to conform to verticality.

In the transition to uprightness, though, changes had to be made. Bindings had to be strong enough to stop the text block from drooping in the binding, or dropping out of it altogether.

Evolving incrementally from lecterns, bookshelves brought a host of thermodynamic and monosyllabic problems: sag, lean, fall, cram, hook, squash. Displaying a peculiar mathematical beauty, the rate of shelf-sag occurs proportionally to the shelf’s length, to the power of four.

Samuel Pepys—a recognizably modern collector with his taste for English literature, science, and maritime voyages—could not tolerate even the slightest deviation from straightness. Fastidious to the point of mania, he buttressed his shelves with elegant brass rods.

Pepys had even less patience for the ragged line that occurs when books of different heights are shelved together. He commissioned tailor-made blocks—little wooden plinths disguised with leather—and placed them under his books so that the tops would be exactly even.

Some collectors have been known to carry tape measures to bookshops, to be sure to buy volumes that are precisely the right size for the gap they are meant to fill. “Inchrule” Brewer, for example, earned his nickname by carrying in his pocket a folding ruler, “wit...

(Manguel’s books were thoughtlessly chosen and thoughtlessly abridged, but the eclectic library was perfect for his son Alberto. With the cut-down books, young Alberto completed his sexual education by reading Lolita, Peyton Place, Main Street, and, in the Espasa–Calper Spanish encyclopedia, the harrowing entry on gonorrhea.)

It is a curious fact of bookcase history that shelves, in their evolution from the lectern desk, first extended upwards towards the ceiling. Only later did they reach for the floor. The medieval shelves that are still in place in the library of Queen’s College, Cambridge, demonstrate neatly the gradual transformation of lecterns into shelves. Founded in 1448, the college’s original library of chained books featured bi-level, standing lecterns, with desks sliding out from underneath a single shelf.

Around the year 1600, carpenters cut off the sloping tops of fourteen of the lecterns and replaced them with single shelves, retaining the decorative ends, which became the sides of the lower part of what were now bookshelves. At a later date, extra shelves were inserted in the mid-level. At a still later date, sometime before 1650, the final stage in the ascension was completed: the open bottoms of the old lecterns were filled with more shelves.

At Queen’s and other English libraries of the same period, the rising shelves created something new in the history of book storage: little private spaces—libraries within libraries. Placing bookcases perpendicular to exterior walls, just as the original lecterns had been placed, is known as the “stall” system.

In European libraries, in contrast, bookcases were usually arranged parallel to and against the walls. This “wall” system was first adopted on a large scale at the Escorial. The Wren Library, at Cambridge’s Trinity College, used a combination of the wall and stall systems.

Whether oriented in parallel or perpendicularly, the full-height bookcase is just one example of a bibliographical technology that was once novel but is now ubiquitous.

Separating words with blank space, and using punctuation marks and colored inks and upper- and lowercase letters to make easier sense of the words on the page—all these date from the time of Charlemagne (c. 747–814). Not until then was writing organized into sentences and paragraphs, ...

An example is the Vergilius Sangallensis, the Virgil manuscript in the abbey library of St. Gall. Produced in Rome late in the fourth or early in the fifth century, the manuscript was written from start to finish in capital letters without breaks or punctuation: one ve...

Today, the numbering of pages—called “pagination”—is ubiquitous. But this, too, was not always so. “Foliation”—numbering leaves rather than page...

Throughout history, different cultures have written and read in different directions on the page. Cuneiform was written and read left to right; Arabic right to left; Chinese top to bottom; and Ancient Greek, for a time, back and forth (“boustrophedon” or “ox-turning”), like plowing a field.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, different tastes and traditions also governed how books would stand on bookshelves. Decisions about whether to shelve books spine-inward or -outward dictated whether titles would appear on spines or fore-edges (the outer extremities of the leaves).

With strikingly photogenic effect, Odorico Pillone shelved his books spine-inward and commissioned the artist Cesare Vecillio to paint 172 of their fore-edges with colorful images relevant to the books’ contents.

In the seventeenth century, an opulent fashion introduced a new twist to fore-edge decoration. Fore-edge paintings were concealed under layers of gold, so that each image would only become visible when the leaves were splayed like a fan. Samuel Mearne pioneered this secret art.

It was effected in watercolor, probably by a hired artist working on the fanned pages “with as dry a brush as possible.” When the paint dried, the finisher squared the pages, then coated them (using camel hair or a sponge) with a mixture of red chalk, black lead, water, and muriatic acid, finally cutting the gold leaf to size and placing it on the surface. The technique is so effective that many book owners fail to notice the magical, disappearing paintings in their collections.

Libraries grow according to their own version of Moore’s Law. Don Tolzman estimated that America’s major libraries were doubling in size every twenty years from the 1870s to the 1940s, and every fifteen years after that.

As early as the seventeenth century, people worried about the rate at which books were proliferating. Leibniz remarked, “if the world goes on this way for a thousand years and as many books are written as today, I’m afraid whole cities will be made up of libraries.”

(In his 1622 Problema Arithmeticum de Rerum Combinationibus, Pierre Guldin formally calculated the number of libraries that would be needed to accommodate all the books that could be written using terms from an alphabet of twenty-three letters. His research generated an answer of Borgesian precision: seventy thousand billion billion words, recorded in 1,000-page volumes with one hundred lines per page and sixty characters per line, would require exactly 8,052,122,350 libraries, each one measuring 132 meters per side.)

From the beginning of the first century B.C., prosperous Roman households maintained libraries, along with staff who worked as readers and scribes. Books could be obtained as war booty, and through dealers in the Greek-founded southern Italian cities such as Syracuse and Naples. The great villa libraries, described by Pliny and Seneca, are examples of a fashionable way to display wealth and learning, almost certainly in that order.