The Library Quotes

“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.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“Joke number CLXI presents a new theory about personal destiny. A quack doctor claims he can produce children of different types—merchants, soldiers, generals—depending on how far his member penetrates. A foolish rustic, hoping for a soldier, hands his wife over to the scoundrel, but then, thinking himself sly, springs from his hiding place and hits the quack’s backside to push his member further in. “Per Sancta Dei Evangelia,” the rustic shouts triumphantly, “hic erit Papa!” “This one will be Pope!”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“And then there is the small matter of the Facetiae, the fifteenth century’s most scandalous book of rude jokes. Poggio wrote the Facetiae between 1438 and 1452. Some of the jokes are about church politics and current affairs. Most are about sex. Jokes about lusty parishioners, lecherous merchants, magical orifices, gullible patients, lewd factotums, randy hermits (St. Gallus must have turned in his grave), simple-minded grooms, libidinous peasants, seductive friars—and the woman who tells her husband she has two vaginas (duos cunnos), one in front that she would share with him; the other behind—for the Church. Building on this theme, Poggio’s joke number CLXXXI is an “Amusing remark by a young woman in labour.” In Florence, a young woman, somewhat of a simpleton, is on the point of giving birth. She has long endured acute pain, and the midwife, candle in hand, inspects secretiora ejus, in order to ascertain if the baby is coming: “Look also on the other side,” the poor creature says. “My husband has sometimes taken that road.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“Though himself married, Isaac Gosset advocated the bachelor state for collectors. “Never think of marriage,” he would say to young book-lovers, “and if the thought should occur, take down a book and begin to read until it vanishes.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

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― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“The Folger librarian Louis Wright wrote of an English wife who parted company with her husband because he insisted upon reciting Shakespeare in the middle of the night. A perhaps less fortunate wife, from Los Angeles, had the same problem except that her husband read Emerson.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“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. Books without spaces and punctuation look utterly forbidding. 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 very long capitalized word that is exhausting for our modern eyes to read.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“Designer clothes were another well-known taste. ‘Just because I am a librarian,’ she declared, ‘doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“In 1905 Morgan appointed Belle da Costa Greene as his librarian and ‘general aide-de-camp’. The surname ‘da Costa’ was a pseudo-Portuguese fiction. ‘Greene’, too, was a falsity; Belle’s name at birth was Belle Marian Greener. She’d gone straight from public school to a job at the Princeton University library. Morgan’s scholarly nephew Junius may have met her there; it was he who introduced her to Morgan. Exotic Greene was even more bohemian than the Sturgeses. She was also promiscuous; the Renaissance expert Bernard Berenson headed the long list of her lovers. (When later asked if she was Morgan’s mistress, she answered candidly, ‘We tried!’) Designer clothes were another well-known taste. ‘Just because I am a librarian,’ she declared, ‘doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“For Umberto Eco, the ideal library was humane and lighthearted, a place where two students could sit on a couch in the afternoon and, without doing anything too indecent, ‘enjoy the continuation of their flirtation in the library as they take down or replace some books of scientific interest from their shelves’.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“Much more than accumulations of books, the best libraries are hotspots and organs of civilisation; magical places in which students, scholars, curators, philanthropists, artists, pranksters and flirts come together and make something marvellous.
Yet none of these descriptions fits comfortably in the arid, clinical, neo-liberal, managerial paradigm of inputs and outputs and outcomes. And therein lies a problem. Throughout most of the modern world, that very paradigm guides how public funds are spent. 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.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“For many years, Larkin was university librarian at Hull University’s Brynmor Jones Library. When Larkin first met a new vice chancellor there, the VC asked for the library’s payroll/non-payroll breakdown. ‘Mind your own fucking business’ was the poet’s muffled reply.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“As an adult, and as a poet of deprivation and ‘being on the edge of things’, Larkin championed public and university libraries. Though sympathetic to Toryism, he came to oppose the 1980s trends—new public management and neo-classical economics—that were antithetical to libraries. For many years, Larkin was university librarian at Hull University’s Brynmor Jones Library. When Larkin first met a new vice chancellor there, the VC asked for the library’s payroll/non-payroll breakdown. ‘Mind your own fucking business’ was the poet’s muffled reply. Larkin served on the board of the British Library, but resigned because of the early starts, and because the ‘fire-trap’ meeting room gave him claustrophobia.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders