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We learned that libraries are much more than mere accumulations of books. Every library has an atmosphere, even a spirit.
Every visit to a library is an encounter with the ethereal phenomena of coherence, beauty, and taste.
When visitors called on the seventeenth-century Welsh bibliophile Sir William Boothby, he wished they would hurry up and leave. “My company is gone, so that now I hope to enjoy my selfe and books againe, which are the true pleasures of my life, all else is but vanity and noyse.
One of the first pieces he wrote after his recovery was a short story titled “The Library of Babel”; Borges called it “a nightmare version or magnification” of the hellish Miguel Cané municipal library.
The author-librarian searched for medieval English texts. “Oh Georgie,” Señora Borges said, “I don’t know why you waste your time with Anglo-Saxon instead of studying something useful like Latin or Greek!”
The book was Charles P. Mountford’s 1976 Nomads of the Australian Desert. Mountford was a noted Australian anthropologist; his book, which included photographs of indigenous ceremonies, was withdrawn from sale on the grounds that it revealed secrets of the Pitjantjatjara people. This was the first time a book had been withdrawn in Australia for reasons of indigenous cultural sensitivity—a watershed moment in the growth of respect for the first Australians.
At Sotheby’s he became notorious for identifying and calling out fakes. He would stride into the salesroom, hurricane-like, and point to Renoirs and Pollocks. “That’s a fake. That’s a fake. That’s a fake.” He would also find fakes outside the salesroom, such as the golden eagle necklace, of the Veraguas culture, which researcher Estelle Neumann wore “flapping between her breasts.”
Books, Petrarch wrote, heartily delight us, speak to us, counsel us, and are joined to us by a living and active relationship. Instructing his servants to guard his library as they would a shrine, he kept up an active acquaintance with his books, just as if they were friends capable of talking.
The Ottoman poet Abdüllatif Çelebi called each of his books a true and loving friend who drives away all cares.
Umberto Eco imagined his books talking among themselves, while Alberto Manguel called the writing of endpaper notes the habit of...
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Reading one book while recalling another was, according to the poet Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, one of the most delicate forms of adultery.
Desiderius Erasmus had clear priorities. “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
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.
Throughout Mesopotamia, scribes used a complex script, known as “cuneiform,” to write Akkadian, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Urartian—a total of fifteen languages from the nursery of civilization, the area of modern-day Syria, Iraq, and western Iran.
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.
The greatest scroll library in all history was assembled downstream from the main source of papyrus. A port city in northern Egypt, Alexandria was a key capital in the Hellenic empire established by Alexander the Great and his generals.
Above the bibliothekai was an inscription: “The place of the cure of the soul.’
Alexandria’s acquisitions policy was a precursor to a law passed by the King of France more than a thousand years later. 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.
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.
“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.
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. Not until the end of the Middle Ages were monastic libraries likely to have more than two or three hundred.
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.
The name of the Rose
The greatest libraries of medieval Islam rose in Córdoba, Baghdad, Cairo, and Fez. They held thousands of scrolls and codices but, by the end of the twelfth century, these had largely been scattered.
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). Famous early libraries that shelved their books spine-inward include Dublin’s Trinity College Library and Spain’s Escorial and Colombina libraries.
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.
The fore-edge painting on Charles’s 1622 Book of Common Prayer is a beautiful example.
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.
In the tenth century, ahead of an imminent Hungarian invasion, a devout, prescient recluse named Wiborada advised the monks to move the library to an even safer place: the island of Reichenau on Lake Constance. 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.
surveying. There he also made his most famous find: the only known manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”). Written in Latin, the manuscript is a poem of 7,400 lines, divided into six books and giving a full description of the world as viewed by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.
For seven centuries the Chinese guarded the secret of paper manufacture. They also tried to eliminate other Asian centers of paper production, to ensure the kind of monopoly the Ptolemies had enjoyed over papyrus. The paper monopoly, though, was inherently fragile. At the Battle of Talas, in 751, the Ottoman Turks defeated the T’ang army. Prisoners were taken to Samarkand, where the local people learned the secrets of papermaking. Soon the people of Samarkand were producing paper in large quantities for export.
Each page of text could be printed from individual letters locked in a frame; the letters could then be unlocked and reused to print further pages. The development of his method of printing took him several years of trial, error, and experimentation. For it to work, the method required dozens of subsidiary and complementary innovations, such as suitable paper, fine metalworking, and oil-based inks.
In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a “mathom” is any portable object for which a Hobbit has no immediate use, but is unwilling to throw away. The “mathom house” is a museum where the Shire’s antiquities, some of them of questionable value, are displayed. Individual Hobbit families keep their mathoms in studies, libraries, and cupboards—most Hobbits live underground and do not have attics.
Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner note how Tolkien repur-posed the term. Tolkien brought it down in the world, for among the hobbits it denotes a piece of bric-a-brac, something that is only subjectively a treasure because you don’t want to part with it, although at the same time it is clear that the giving of presents, many of which were probably mathoms, was a highly important part of hobbit life.
Eco would give his medieval library a blind librarian, and name him “Jorge da Burgos.”
It is also a land of libraries. Tolkien invented languages, and he invented books and libraries in which to house them. Intricately wrought by their creator, Middle-earth’s libraries come in many different forms. Collections of books are housed in towers, citadels, studies, treasuries, strongrooms, and bedrooms. Tolkien’s fiction is a sustained hymn to bibliophilia.
In Tolkien’s world, Elvish culture serves as an idealized version of ancient Greece and Rome. Books are central to that cultural ideal. The second letter of the Elvish alphabet is parma, “book.” (The first letter is tinco, “metal.”)
Elves received the art of book-making as a gift from a god—the divine master craftsman, Aulë.
At the start of the First Age, the Dwarf king Durin I established a library at Moria (also known as the Dwarrow Delf and Khazad-dûm), a Dwarvish city excavated in stone far beneath the Misty Mountains.
Hugo Bracegirdle borrowed and kept such a quantity of Bilbo’s books that, when Bilbo left the Shire in Third Age 3001, he pointedly gave Hugo one of his bookcases in which to store them.
For Tolkien, libraries signified civilization. All the civilized peoples of Middle-earth regard their books as precious. The demonic goblins he called “orcs” represent a dangerous, mindless, industrial future. They and all the other evil races are destroyers of books, and never make them.
Charles Van Hulthem perished much as he had lived. “Carried away by a sudden apoplectic fit, he died on a pile of books like a warrior on the battlefield.”
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.
The tradition of public libraries was revived in the European renaissance. In the sixteenth century, Nuremberg’s civic authorities established a municipal library; by the 1550s it contained some 4,000 volumes, manuscript and printed.
The Star Wars prequels introduced the Jedi temple and, at its heart, the Jedi library—a digital collection of books and star maps and other inter-galactic media. As author and book historian David Pearson noticed, the design of the Jedi library is strikingly reminiscent of the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin. So reminiscent, in fact, that the library issued a “please explain” to Lucasfilm.
Find this out
Before Google Books there was Project Gutenberg, which placed tens of thousands of texts on the internet. Alberto Manguel lamented that many of the texts were duplicates, and many more were unreliable, “having been hastily scanned and badly checked for typographical errors.” Paul Duguid noticed another problem of curation. While in many ways Project Gutenberg resembled—and even improved upon—a traditional, analogue library, it also resembled “a church jumble-sale bookstall, where gems and duds are blessed alike by the vicar because all have been donated.”
