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Perhaps the oldest oral library in the world was formed over a span of tens of thousands of years in the arid lands of central Australia. There, the Arrernte people developed a complex system of tribal knowledge, beliefs, duties, and ethics—what Van Gennep called, in his 1906 Mythes et légendes d’Australie, “at one and the same time fragments of a catechism, a liturgical manual, a history of civilization, a geography textbook [and] a manual of cosmography.” Indigenous Australians sometimes refer to this expansive system as their “Dreaming” and their “Dreaming stories.”
Once in Australia, he focused on the tjurunga tracks, which held an irresistible appeal as an antipodean analogue to Britain’s mystical ley lines.
Taking away the tjurungas, and failing to guard their
secrets, was as much a library crime as the institutional depredations of notorious book thieves such as Thomas Wise, Count Libri, and James Halliwell.
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. Both etymologies relate to forest materials for book-making.
The library was also the venue for important translations, such as rendering the Torah from Biblical Hebrew into Greek—the famous Septuagint. Ptolemy II Philadelphus was behind this project. He asked seventy-two Jewish scholars to undertake the translation. According to the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud, a miracle of congruency followed. King Ptolemy once gathered seventy-two Elders. He placed them in seventy-two chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one’s room
and said: “Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.” God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.
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. Books obtained in this way were identified in the catalogue as “from
the ships.” 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. According to Galen, the great library could only keep the Athenian books by forfeiting an enormous bond of fifteen talents (450 kilograms) of gold or silver.
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.
The intimate relationship between furniture design, book formats, and library layouts would persist over the next 2,000 years or so.
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.
Displaying a peculiar mathematical beauty, the rate of shelf-sag occurs proportionally to the shelf’s length, to the power of four. In light of such bookshelf calculus, the modern library reformer Melvil Dewey thought the optimal shelf length was one meter. Any longer and sagging was inevitable without costly reinforcement.
When the invaders came, the monks sought refuge in a nearby fortress, but Wiborada remained in her recluse’s cell at the church of St. Magnus. Killed by the intruders at the beginning of May 926, she became in 1047 the first woman in the history of the church to be canonized. Today, she is honored as the patron saint of libraries and bibliophiles.
Eugene Field, author of The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, wrote lyrically on the subject: “Sweeter than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is the smell of those old books of mine.”
With candles forbidden and electricity not yet harnessed, the only solution was natural light. Medieval buildings purpose-built to house books can be identified today by their narrow, regularly spaced, south-facing windows, which alternated between lecterns and, later, bookcases.
The designers of the Hofbibliothek and the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome played games with perspective and the perception of height. The library at Melk Abbey is another example. Fixed in position, the shelves there are placed to enhance the sensation of scale. The higher shelves are set closer together, and the very top shelf is so impossibly shallow that real books will not fit. For that shelf, the designers resorted to fake books: little book-shaped blocks made from wood and labeled with playfully literal titles such as Wood by Anonymous and Empty by Woody.
the skills of a gentleman, a scholar, and a police officer. The staff needed to know how to handle themselves, such as when a senior academic invited a deputy superintendent to “step outside” the reading room. When asked why, the academic responded: “In order that I may punch you in the eye, and so relieve my feelings about the inefficiency of this library.”
Panizzi broke away from the dominant “hall with gallery” style of library and instead created separate spaces for shelving books and for reading them. He personally planned the British Museum’s iconic reading room, which was formally opened, with a champagne breakfast, in 1857. The room’s dome fell just short of the Pantheon, and set a new international benchmark for library design and the design of all public spaces.
Another professor, this one from Ohio State University, stole pages from a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Vatican Library.
Despite all the precautions, Gilkey comes across as a mild, personable chap, definitely no Hannibal Lecter, clearly enjoying Bartlett’s dishabille visit, happy to spill the beans on how he used the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list to know what to steal, and on how stealing books helped him pretend to be Sherlock Holmes.
In the spring of 2012, art history professor Tomaso Montanari called on the closed library and was shocked to find inside a busy scene of disarray: piles of books, garbage on the floor, stray dogs, and a stray blonde, reportedly wearing a tracksuit and carrying a beauty-case on her way to the bathroom.
As soon as librarians climbed ladders they fell from them.
In decisions about staffing, he steered clear of a certain type of woman librarian, which he described as “owl-eyed and awkward, wearing spectacles and an air of gloom.” Wright searched the northern hemisphere for “bright young women” genuinely interested in books and the operations of a research library. “We are not impressed,” he wrote, “when some young thing gushes that she ‘just loves Shakespeare.’ A love of Shakespeare is less important than common sense and an ability to type.”
At Unseen University on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, magical codices struggle against their chains, and the orangutan librarian is a formidable protector of three things: silence, the library’s lending policies, and the physical laws of the universe.
To picture the library, Eco studied and drew hundreds of library plans, abbey plans, mirror galleries, and mazes—Greek, rhizome, Mannerist, imaginary. The floor labyrinth of Rheims cathedral was one of several especially helpful benchmarks. Known today only from drawings and paintings, that labyrinth was in the shape of an octagon, and had a smaller octagon in each corner, similar in shape to a corner tower. (Canon Jacquemart destroyed the maze in the eighteenth century, allegedly because he was annoyed by children playing there, seeking out the pathways during services.)
The irony of Rome’s first public libraries was that they closely followed Greek models and were largely built from the spoils of war, including plundered Greek manuscripts.
Today, Britain’s public libraries are caught in a downward spiral of reduced funding and the de-professionalization of library services. In The Strange Rise of Semi-literate England, Bill West decried the dispersal of public collections, the neglect of the literary classics, and libraries’ disproportionate emphasis on matters other than the acquisition of good books. That emphasis has led to a series of unexpected calamities.
Over the past decade, Britain’s municipal authorities have closed hundreds of branch libraries. In response to plans to shut ten of Newcastle’s eighteen libraries, the playwright Lee Hall recalled the efforts of workingmen and -women to fight for those same libraries, and “for the right to read and grow intellectually, culturally and socially.” It is a heritage that took decades and decades to come to fruition but will be wiped out in a moment. You are not only about to make philistines of yourselves, but philistines of us all.
The history of libraries is rich with stories of how ready access to books meant access to work and social mobility, and the awakening of intellectual lives. Shutting down libraries, people feared, would prevent the chairs from jumping on the tables.
Much more than accumulations of books, the best libraries are hotspots and organs of civilization; magical places in which students, scholars, curators, philanthropists, artists, pranksters, and flirts come together and make something marvelous.
The inputs for libraries (books, librarians, capital) are easy enough to identify, and to count. But what are the “outputs” of a library, and how might the “outcomes” be measured? The “performance” of libraries resists evaluation as much as the “customers” of libraries resist classification.
“Investing in a library,” another observer said, “requires an act of faith.” But leaps of faith are precisely what the cost-sphinctering managerialist paradigm is meant to prevent. The people of Alexandria and Athens knew the value of books for scholarship and culture and civil society. In large part, the history of libraries is the history of how that value was forgotten, then rediscovered, then forgotten again.
The digitization of bibliographical treasure is a valuable means through which rare books and manuscripts can be discovered, studied, appreciated, and enjoyed. Digitization, combined with online publication, gives easy access to texts from anywhere in the world. Ease of access to rare materials is a boon, as is ease of discoverability. Digitization is also a technique of conservation. The case for digitizing early and precious materials is obvious, particularly for especially delicate books that cannot be handled without endangering them.
Without boundaries and selection
and navigation, libraries are useless.
