The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

by Stuart Kells

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.

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, with a capital at the beginning of each sentence and a full stop at the end.

Foliation”—numbering leaves rather than pages—predominated in the sixteenth century. Pagination only gained its ascendancy after 1600.

Sir Robert Cotton was at his tailor’s shop when he saw by chance an ancient document that the tailor was about to cut up and use as a tape measure. On examination, the sheepskin parchment turned out to be an original Magna Carta—one of as few as four that King John had signed in 1215—still with “all its appendages of seals and signatures” attached.

Book-makers targeted their wares not only at the clergy and the aristocracy, but also at scholars, who could now debate books over long distances by citing page numbers and diagrams from identical printed copies.

Regarded as one of the finest books ever made, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is renowned for the beauty of its design, and how seamlessly it integrated Griffo’s Roman type with 174 woodcuts. The book was highly influential: among other reverberations, it caused French printers to switch from Gothic to Roman typefaces.

Thomas Platter left behind a diary that is important for sixteenth-century evidence about the literary culture of the time. In 1599 he visited London where he saw, at the Globe Theatre, an early production of Julius Caesar.

There are also accounts of the trial of the Knights Templar held at Chinon in August 1308; the 1493 papal bull that split the New World between Spain and Portugal; Leo X’s 1521 decree excommunicating Martin Luther; and letters from Elizabeth I, Voltaire, Abraham Lincoln, and, written on fragile birch bark, a group of Christian Ojibwe Indians. (Addressed to Pope Leo, or “the Great Master of Prayer, he who holds the place of Jesus,” that letter is postmarked, “where there is much grass, in the month of the flowers.”)

Mostly bound in cream vellum, the Secret Archive volumes, some more than a foot thick, are housed in the Tower of Winds, whose rooms are lined with more than eighty kilometers of dark wooden shelves.

an unclassified collection deserved the name “library” as little as a crowd of men deserved to be called an army.

Poggio invented the elegant humanist script (based on the Caroline minuscule) that served, after a generation of polishing, as the prototype for Roman fonts.

As Burnett Streeter noted in his 1931 survey of chained libraries, “in the Middle Ages books were rare, and so too was honesty.”

America was, after all, a Jacobean project—just like the First Folio.

Reading a book on-screen or in microfilm was an unsatisfactory experience, like kissing a girl through a windowpane.