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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.”
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.
Scholars have noticed a relationship between the availability of writing materials, the vibrancy of literary activity, and the growth of libraries. According to Herodotus, by 500 B.C. papyrus was the preferred writing material on the Grecian peninsula. 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
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To write cuneiform, Mesopotamian scribes used chevron-shaped styli to impress precise signs (representing sounds) into wet clay. Thomas Hyde, Regius Professor of Hebrew and Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford University, gave cuneiform its name; the signs brought to mind for him cuneus, the Latin word for “wedge.” The script was so complex that some of the first modern archaeologists denied it was a script at all.
Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri is an example of the scroll libraries that were common in ancient Rome. Eighteen hundred scrolls were unearthed there in the eighteenth century—the most well-preserved library from antiquity.
We also know that, under the Ptolemies, the office of Alexandrian librarian was a high one, suitable for royal tutors and superannuated military men.
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
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The Ptolemies’ appetite for the classics was voracious. Apart from mandating the copying of texts, the king sent his agents far and wide to borrow and buy more and more books. This appetite created another opening for book-world entrepreneurs. 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
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Even legitimate-seeming scholars produced fraudulent works for sale to the library. 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.” The book found its way into the collection, where it was treated as a legitimate text. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch both took the manuscript seriously. 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
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Whatever the cause, virtually every scroll in the library was destroyed. 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.
The collapse of the Byzantine Empire elevated Rome, Milan, and Florence as centers of classical learning. It also helped make Venice a center for trade in Greek manuscripts. Impacts were felt further afield, too, at emerging and later libraries such as the Bodleian, Königsberg, and Wolfenbüttel. Ultimately, books and texts from Constantinople nourished the world.
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. We take it for granted today that books can slide in and out of shelves smoothly.
Today, the numbering of pages—called “pagination”—is ubiquitous. But this, too, was not always so. “Foliation”—numbering leaves rather than pages—predominated in the sixteenth century. Pagination only gained its ascendancy after 1600. Like the books that preceded printing, the first generation of printed books (those printed before 1475) hardly used any numbering at all.
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.
Books were pivotal to Benedictine monastic practice.
Late in the ninth century, the monks moved their books to a fortified building, adjoining the church, called Hartmut Tower—named after the recently deceased abbot. 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
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Thanks to this and other disposals, bibliophiles made wonderful finds in unlikely locations. 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.
An exceptionally early version of the Latin Bible, the Vetus Latina pre-dated St. Jerome’s Vulgate Bible. When later and “better” Bible texts came available, the monks of St. Gall cut their Vetus Latina into strips of parchment and used them as reinforcement in the spines and covers of newer manuscripts.
Naturally for a place founded by an Irish monk, St. Gall held early Irish manuscripts. Numbering fifteen volumes in all, they dated from the seventh to the ninth century, the foundation years of the monastery. Priceless artifacts from the era in which Irish and Scottish missionaries helped preserve and renew European Christianity, all fifteen were of worldwide importance for the history of religion, culture, language, and paleography. One of them, for example—the Grammatica Prisciana, c. 845—is today the main source for the philology of Old Irish. How, then, did the monks of St. Gall treat the
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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.
There are European printed books that pre-date Gutenberg’s. Block books were produced in Europe by the mid-fifteenth century, as were single devotional woodcut prints. Laurens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem printed around the time of Gutenberg’s first experiments, and may in fact have been the first European to print with movable type. But his productions were of a low standard; Coster was a less exacting craftsman than the gem-cutter from Mainz. Gutenberg was the first craftsman in Europe to make letterpress printing viable and beautiful.
Things were going well for Gutenberg, until disaster struck. Fust expected a prompt return on his 1,600 guilders, but Gutenberg was taking too long. In 1455, even though the Bible was all but finished, Fust foreclosed on the original loan and took Gutenberg to court. The moneylender prevailed and took over the valuable security: the printer’s equipment and edition. Gutenberg was ruined.
In the history of the book, Gutenberg was shunted aside. His former financier and his former apprentice made no mention of him in their productions. He died in 1468; decades would pass before he received any credit for his future-shaping achievements.
An efficient printer could produce in one day what a competent scribe could accomplish in six months. In the first hundred years of printing, more books were produced than in the previous thousand years of scribework.
(Medieval scribes may have introduced deliberate imperfections into their manuscripts, but the arrival of printing opened the way for a new kind of error. The first Bibles to be printed in English are noted, and indeed classified—as He bibles, She bibles, Breeches bibles, Wicked bibles and so on—for their typographical and editorial idiosyncrasies, some of which are highly regrettable. The Wicked Bible of 1631, for example, left out a critical word, rendering the seventh commandment as, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The whole edition was recalled; Barker the printer would never print again;
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Though many books continued to be written and printed in Latin, more and more books in the vernacular languages appeared. The Renaissance was an era of translation. By 1528, for example, Livy, Suetonius, Thucydides, and Xenophon were all available in French. This made the texts accessible to an audience that was neither academic nor clerical.
Greater access to books and learning in turn promised greater social mobility.
In the first years of censorship, things were very different. Sex was the least of the censors’ worries. In England, for example, the primary concern of the Tudors was the eradication of heretical and treasonous works. Except in the most extreme cases, lewd and bawdy literature was tolerated.
Producers, sellers, and readers of unauthorized books faced a plethora of punishments. Offenders could be fined or excommunicated. Their books could be burned, or they themselves could
Book-burners set fires on both sides of the Protestant Reformation.
Applying his linguistic expertise, Valla achieved major scholarly breakthroughs, especially in the field of sniffing out fakes, such as those bogus texts from Alexandria. He had already demonstrated, in 1440, that a document called the Donation of Constantine, allegedly composed by the emperor who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, was in fact a clever forgery. In the donation, Constantine supposedly transferred power over the western provinces of the empire, including Italy, to the Church. The document’s exposure as a forgery was a calamitous blow to the Vatican’s prestige.
Nicholas V funded the purchase, the copying, and the illustration of manuscripts on a scale never before seen. He sent agents all over Europe to search for valuable books. His librarian, Tortelli, organized the rapidly expanding library. It contained about 1,200 entries, of which more than eight hundred were Latin manuscripts and approximately four hundred were Greek. Nicholas V’s successor, the Spanish canonist Calixtus III, was appalled. When shown the library, he exclaimed, “Just see what the property of God’s church has been wasted on!”
Prior to 1692 the French national library was closed to the public; “even a scholar of the eminence of Isaac Vossius could only gain admittance through influence at court.” This all changed when a curious appointment was made. For a significant part of the reign of Louis XIV, François Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois, was Secretary of State for War. In the last decades of his life he was the most powerful of the king’s ministers. In 1684 Louvois purchased the office of Royal Librarian for his fourth son, as a ninth-birthday present. The incumbent librarians and their agents were
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Clement XIII was the notoriously prudish pope who put fig leaves over the rude bits of the Vatican’s nudes. In 1765 he issued a bull limiting access to the manuscripts, locking many of them away “under double keys.” At the end of the eighteenth century, things were so bad that a Spanish priest, Juan Andres, denounced the library as not so much a biblioteca as a bibliotaphio, a tomb for books.
Today, however, the picture of the Vatican Library as forbidding and inaccessible is largely a myth. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a succession of brilliant directors—Father Franz Ehrle (1895–1913; he became a cardinal), Monsignor Achille Ratti (1913–22, formerly librarian of the Ambrosian, and later Pope Pius XI), Monsignor Giovanni Mercati (1922–36, another future cardinal), and Monsignor Anselmo Albareda (1936–62, ditto)—transformed the library into one of the world’s most progressive and efficient libraries, notwithstanding those covered shoulders.
None of the ancient manuscripts for which the Vatican Library is now famous were obtained before the fifteenth century—a time when the church was much less centralized and papalized, and when other Catholic collections overshadowed the pope’s library.
Though a symbol of religion and the early papacy, the Vatican Library is in fact a product of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
The executors’ destruction of Sodom echoed another act that took place less than a decade earlier, and that has been described as the greatest literary crime in history: the burning of the personal memoirs of the poet and libertine Lord Byron. Soon after Byron’s death in 1824, three men disposed of the manuscript: the publisher John Murray; the poet Thomas Moore; and Byron’s longtime companion, John Cam Hobhouse. Along with lawyers representing Byron’s married half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and his widow, Anne Isabella, these men decided the manuscript would ruin Byron’s reputation, it was that
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Peter Cochran has recently argued that, apart from “protecting” Byron’s reputation, the three men had other, less noble, motivations. Hobhouse was embarking on a political career. Murray was worried that a rival publisher might secure the right to issue the memoirs. And both Murray and Hobhouse grappled with feelings of betrayal and a desire for revenge. Moore, for his part, seems to have been bamboozled into playing along; Corin Throsby pictured him “overwhelmed by what he called the “hoity toity proceeding”—complicated issues of copyright and payment, and Hobhouse’s self-righteous bullying.”
The chaotic, punitive dispersal of Wilde’s library during his obscenity trials was for him the most distressing event in a life marred by tragedies.
Apart from destroying many libraries, the 1666 Great Fire of London also obliterated bulk quantities of unsold books. Shakespeare’s 1663 Third Folio, for example, is rarer than his First Folio because many of the Third Folio copies were destroyed in the stock of booksellers.
Apart from an intolerable human cost, wars and revolutions have levied a terrible toll on cultural heritage. Along with other cultural artifacts, books are, as William Ewart Gladstone put it, “the bonds and rivets of the race”—and there is no better way to destroy a culture than to destroy its books. Throughout the history of libraries, the wholesale destruction and plunder of books has been an appalling constant.
In pre-Columbian America, the Conquistadors burned Mayan books; as few as three genuine Mayan codices survive today, and as few as fourteen Aztec ones—the other Aztec books were despatched by the Inquisition.
Portuguese libraries have long relied on biological controls. The eighteenth-century libraries of Coimbra and Mafra host colonies of tiny bats. In summer the bats roost outside; in winter they roost behind the bookcases. Each night they earn their keep by feeding on bookworms and other bibliopests. Each morning the librarians earn their keep by sweeping up droppings. The micro bats might be helpful in Portugal, but larger bats, along with pigeons and damp, did much damage to the manuscripts at Durham Cathedral when it fell into neglect during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Five years later, Widener attended the Sotheby’s London auction of the library of Henry Huth, co-founder of the Bibliographical Society. There, Widener bought the second edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays. “I think I’ll take that little Bacon with me in my pocket,” he said, “and if I am shipwrecked it will go down with me.” A few days later, he and the book sank with the Titanic.
Henry had bought scores of First Folios. Today, the Folger Library stores them in the same way that the first codices were stored: lying down. On its face, this obsessive acquiring of multiple copies seems a decadent, even vulgar pursuit. But scholars comparing the folios have made striking discoveries. Textual changes occurred during the printing process.
(At Yale University, rumors circulated that, in the event of a nuclear attack, the Beinecke Library could descend and become an ultra-modern, über-bookish shelter. The stream that runs beneath the library is just one of several damning problems with that rumor.)
In 1956 a “well-meaning and worried friend of the Folger” asked whether Wright was concerned about the devaluation of the library’s assets, “in case the promoters of Christopher Marlowe proved that he wrote Shakespeare’s plays.” Wright assured the friend cheerfully that the Folger “had hedged years ago by acquiring one of the finest Marlowe collections in the world.” As a consequence, the Folger was “sitting pretty”; the friend appeared relieved.
“Nevertheless, dream and fantasy laugh at accountants.”
