The Library
by Stuart Kells
(Counterpoint, Berkeley, California, 2017)
We relished the chance to work with objects, not just ideas.
Page x.
We explored national libraries, workingmen’s libraries, subscription libraries, scholarly libraries, corporate libraries, club libraries, plush private libraries, and very modest ones, like the collection of “found” books amassed by a demolition man in the course of his labors, every volume methodically catalogued and lovingly preserved.
Page x.
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.
Page xi.
Creating a library is a psychically loaded enterprise. In gathering their bounty, book-lovers have displayed anxiety, avarice, envy, fastidiousness, obsession, lust, pride, pretension, narcissism, and agoraphobia.
Page xi.
Collectors, having acquired and arranged their books through whichever means, have used every kind of simile to described their beloved possessions. Garden flowers, verdant leaves, precious fruit, flowing fountains. Ships, houses, bricks, doors, nails, bullets, daggers, scents, elixirs, meteorites, gems, friends, offspring, prisoners, tenants, soldiers, lovers, wraiths, devils, bones, eyes, teeth.
Page xii.
Libraries are full of stories. Stories of life and death, lust and loss, keeping faith and breaking faith. Stories of every possible human drama. And via complex, fractal, inter-generational threads, all the stories are connected.
Page xiii.
Practical immortality is a larger part of why people love books. And why we write them.
Page xiii.
If a library can be something as simple as an organized collection of tests, then libraries massively pre-date books in the history of culture. Every country has a tradition of legends, parables, riddles, myths and chants that existed long before they were written down.
Page 3.
Cultures that lacked any form of writing could only ever preserve their texts imperfectly. Those cultures, though, adopted elaborate techniques (such as intricate patterns of repetition) and rules (such as social obligations and taboos) to maintain, as best they could, the integrity of their texts.
Page 4.
Books, Petrarch wrote, heartily delight us, speak to us, counsel us, and are joined to us buy 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 it they were friends capable of talking.
Page 14.
Assembling a library is a minefield of etiquette. In the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical and monastic librarians divided sacred from profane books, and were forbidden from placing “unholy” books above holy ones, even in temporary storage.
Page 15.
Bibliophiles frequently refer to themselves as “wedded” to their books; those unable to resist the charms of human marriage have been known to keep their purchases secret form their human spouses.
Page 16.
First came oral libraries, then collections of physical books. The roots of the words “library” and “book” derive from different languages - liber is from Latin, while bece, buc, and boc are form the cluster of Germanic languages that includes Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English.
Page 18.
As soon as people began writing things down, the properties and availability of book-making materials became intertwined with the history of books and libraries.
Page 18.
In the making of books, local availability long dictated what materials would be used, and to what extent; local abundance enabled abundant use.
Page 19.
The ancient city of Pergamum, in what is now turkey, lay at the center of a region of cattle, sheep, and goat grazing. Animal skins for making parchment were therefore plentiful.
Page 19.
Parchment is made by washing and stretching a split skin and rubbing it smooth. A single flawless sheep yields one folio sheet.
Page 19.
In the year 1000 C.E., an average-sized book consumed the skins of dozens, even hundreds of animals. A 1,000-page Bible, for example, needed 250 sheep.
Pages 19-20.
Vellum, the most deluxe and tragic form of parchment - made form the skin of bovine fetuses - is smooth, white, and highly workable.
Page 20.
Scholars have noticed a relationship between the availability of writing materials, the vibrancy of literary activity, and the growth of libraries. … When Athens imported large quantities of Egyptian papyrus, a flood of Athenian literary work followed and the city’s libraries prospered.
Page 21.
In early Christian times, increased supplies of parchment - favored as a more reliable alternative to papyrus - made possible the monastic output of codices.
Page 21.
Throughout Mesopotamia, scribes used a complex script, known as “cuneiform,” to write Akkadian, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Urartian - a total of fifteen language from the nursery of civilization, the area of modern-day Syria, Iraq, and western Iran.
Page 22.
To write cuneiform, Mesopotamian scribes used chevron-shaped styli to impress precise signs representing sounds) into wet clay.
Page 22.
The first clay tablets were shape-coded: square for financial accounts, round for farming records, and so on.
Page 23.
Papyrus is well suited to scrolls. The libraries of the ancient world - patrician, official, scholarly, domestic - stored their scrolls in chests, niches, and hatbox-like containers knows as capsae.
Page 24.
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.
Page 25.
The library adopted an admirably inclusive and international ambition: to assemble books from all the known countries and in all the languages.
Page 25.
While in reality most of the texts obtained by the library were Greek, it did succeed in gathering substantial numbers of books from India, the Near and Middle East, and elsewhere in the Alexandrine world - books that represented a multitude of philosophies and creeds.
Page 25.
The royal library at Nineveh was an attempt by King Ashurbanipal to collect all available knowledge in one place.
Page 26.
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.
Page 27.
Once Alexandria became notorious as a book moocher, other cities and libraries refused to lend their books unless the Ptolemies staked large security deposits.
Page 28.
In the history of Western thought, the library came to rival Athens as an intellectual powerhouse.
Page 29.
A class of para-literary workers on the fringes of the library produced forgeries.
Page 29.
The Great Library of Alexandria flourished for three centuries, or perhaps as many as nine - from around 300 B.C. to 642 A.D. - no one knows for sure.
Page 31.
Without a large and unwavering commitment to conservation and copying, a library of papyrus scrolls will readily and unceremoniously disintegrate - especially in the damp conditions of a river delta. Alexandria’s library might have just faded away.
Page 32.
By sea and by land, along trade routes and pilgrim routes, the books and texts from Constantinople fed Eastern and Western monasteries and other public and private collections such as the papal library, the Ambrosian, and the Laurentian. The collapse of the byzantine Empire elevated Rome, Milan, and Florence as centers of classical learning.
Page 33.
Ultimately, books and tests from Constantinople nourished the world. The histories of humankind’s libraries are intricately interwoven.
Page 33.
Throughout the classical world, the papyrus scroll was the dominant form of book. The days of scroll libraries, though, were always numbered. As a surface for writing, parchment is demonstrably superior to papyrus. More tolerant of folding and of damp, it is also easier to obtain and therefore harder to monopolize. Unlike papyrus scrolls, sheets of parchment will happily take ink on both sides. Cut and folded into rectangular gatherings, parchment can be used to make hinged books - called codices - that store more information with less space. The reader can jump to a chapter or passage without manually scrolling through nine meters of papyrus. Codices also suit reference guides such as contents pages, indexes, and page numbers - guides that are practically useless in scrolls. Gradually, the parchment codex replaced the papyrus scroll.
Page 37.
The first recognizably modern codices, with strong and flexible parchment pages, did not arrive until around 100 A.D., or perhaps a little later. That model was perfected over subsequent centuries until, probably in an early monastic workshop, an inventive binder fastened gatherings of parchment leaves to cords and (crucially, for strength) to each other. The binder then bonded the sewn gatherings by applying glue to their back. This method resulted in a book block that would hold its shape, open flat on a table, and protect the text when the book was not in use.
Pages 38-39.
In Roman times, shortly before the Christian era, the growing use of desks led writers to prefer square sheets of parchment, which in turn were well suited to the codex format. The intimate relationship between furniture design, book formats, and library layouts would persist over the next 2,000 years or so.
Page 39.
Many scribes in the classical world were slaves. Now, in the monastic scriptoria, the scribes were freemen, more or less, who took pride in their work.
Page 39.
The very act of carefully copying out texts buy forming each stroke and each letter by hand was itself an act of observance and devotion.
Page 39.
Manuscript production was holy work.
Page 39.
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.
Pages 40-41.
Some large libraries did flourish in the middle of the Middle Ages. Those libraries were in the Arab world and the Far East.
Page 41.
In medieval Christian libraries, the first codices were kept in chests and on lecterns rather than in bookstores. The practice of storing books on shelves came later. Titles were seldom displayed on the outside of books. With so few about, there was no need … Whenever a medieval scholar wished to consult a book, he or she could know which book was which by its size, shape, color, and placement.
Page 41.
It is a curious fact of bookcase history that shelves, in their evolution from the lectern desk, first extended upwards towards the ceiling. Only later did they reach for the floor.
Pages 43-44.
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.
Page 45.
Book spines and edges can be read to reveal much about how books were used and stored.
Page 46.
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. Globally, the British Library was the first collection to surpass 100 million items. The Library of Congress was not far behind. As early as the seventeenth century, people worried about the rate at which books were proliferating.
Page 47.
Apart from filling public libraries, books infiltrated households and formed themselves into private libraries. From the beginning of the first century B.C., prosperous Roman households maintained libraries, along with staff who worked as readers and scribes. … are examples of a fashionable way to display wealth and learning, almost certainly in that order.
Page 48.
As soon as books were common enough to collect, bibliophiles were the subject of ridicule.
Page 49.
The mere reading of a rare book is a puerility, and idiosyncrasy of adolescence.
Page 51.
Iceland and on Scotland’s remote northwest coast, Celtic Christians pioneered a monastic culture that helped keep European art and civilization alive.
Page 52.
Between 1378 and 1417, first two and then three concurrent popes claimed authority over western Christendom. Each contender maintained his own Sacred College of Cardinals, and his own administrators and offices. The causes of the split were political rather than theological. The followers of the rival popes were divided, in large part, along geographical lines. Naturally, the spectacle of the Great Schism seriously eroded the prestige of the church and the papacy.
Page 53.
Books were pivotal to Benedictine monastic practice. St. Benedict’s precepts mandated daily readings.
Page 54.
The growth of printing in England was intimately linked to the availability of a viable alternative to parchment.
Page 79.
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 monopo9ly, though, was inherently fragile.
Page 80.
Gradually, just as parchment had replaced papyrus, paper superseded parchment as the principal material for making books.
Page 81.
The central insight of Gutenberg’s invention was that much could be gained in speed and efficiency if the letters of the alphabet were cut in the form of reusable type. Each page of text could be printed form individual letters locked in a frame; the letters could then be unlocked and reused to print further pages. … For it to work, the method required dozens of subsidiary and complementary innovations, such as suitable paper, fine metalworking, and oil-based inks.
Page 82.
Gutenberg produced about 180 copies of the forty-two-line Bible, some on vellum but most on paper.
Page 83.
Gutenberg was the first craftsman in Europe to make letterpress printing viable and beautiful. He took sample pages of his Bible to the Frankfurt Trade Fair (Frankfurter Messe).
Page 83.
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.
Page 84.
Though the technology took hold only gradually, and though the first printers preferred to use parchment and took pains to replicate the look and feel of manuscripts, the world had undergone a sea change in book media.
Page 84.
It is estimated that, before the printing press, there were 50,000 books in the whole of Europe. Fifty years after Gutenberg’s first Bible, the number of books exceeded 8 million, the number of editions 28,000. 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 scribe work. This revolution drove a thousand innovations in how ideas and knowledge were spread, and an equal number of innovations in libraries.
Page 84.
The world’s new readers, and their public and private libraries, printer-publishers exploited the newly dug channels of international commerce. The Frankfurt Book Fair, or Frankfurter Buchmesse, began in 1478.
Page 86.
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.
Page 87.
Greater access to books and learning in turn promised greater social mobility.
Page 87.
Eighteenth-century Italy and France were enormously productive of printed pornography and other forbidden books.
Page 89.
Despite the popularity of erotica, its collection has always carried a stigma.
Page 89.
The twentieth and final edition of the Vatican’s Index appeared in 1948. Pope Paul VI formally discontinued the Index on June 14, 1966.
Page 93.
Popularized as an Enlightenment-age expression of wonder at the physical world, the “cabinet of curiosities” was a feature of .many libraries … Grand or humble, each cabinet tried to capture the richness of the universe on a miniature scale.
Page 95.
Today, the Vatican’s book collections, especially the fabled Secret Archive and the prohibited books, present a hypnotically alluring prospect for book-lovers.
Page 97.
The Vatican Library is believed to have begun around 385 A.D. as the personal library of Pope Damasus I.
Page 97.
Pope Nicholas V is credited as the true founder of the Vatican Library. He used as a model the Medici library at the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence.
Page 98.
The library had become nothing less than the largest collection of books in the Western world.
Page 99.
From the Renaissance until today, the story of the Vatican’s collections is a story if irrepressible growth: a marvelous cascade from donors intent on saving their books, and their souls.
Page 101.
At the Vatican Library, the idea of allowing scholars to consult the collections was first broached in the middle of the fifteenth century, during the brief but energetic pontificate of polymath and bibliophile Nicholas V.
Page 106.
For more than 1,000 years after the fall of Rome, the papal collections grew, but he growth was halting and haphazard. Losses due to fire were many, as were those due to theft, plunder, and conservation ignorance. None of the ancient manuscripts for which the Vatican Library is now famous were obtained before the fifteenth century. … Very few of the Vatican’s current holdings were acquired prior to 1600, and many key acquisitions date from much later than that. Though a symbol of religion and the early papacy, the Vatican Library is in fact a product of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
Page 107.
Books can also be dated by their smell. Volatile organic compounds in paper, leather, and glue are known to degrade at predictable rates.
Page 108.
Authors have written about the sound of libraries, likening the “whispering of the leaves of books” to “the lisping of lake-waves, or the remonstrance of a shy stream at the overtures of the young wind when the morning or the evening stars sing together.” (In pre-alphabet societies, according toe Marshal McLuhan, the dominant organ of sensory and social orientation was the ear: “hearing was believing.”) In the normal course of events, though, libraries are about seeing.
Page 114.
Seeing requires light. That necessity, along with fear of fire, dominated the design and management of early libraries.
Page 115.
The windows were narrow for a reason. Light had a disintegrating effect on leather, as can readily be seen when books have stood for any appreciable length of time in direct sunlight.
Page 115.
The British Museum’s domed reading room also has secret doors. To maintain the impression of an unbroken series of books around the walls, the dome’s pillars and access doors are painted with false book-backs.
Page 120.
On medieval codices, raised bands were a necessity: they revealed the heavier cords that were used to hold gatherings together in a strong text b lock.
Page 121.
Libraries, though curated, are quintessentially places of serendipity.
Page 123.
Libraries can hide things other than books. Some conceal their true makeup and their true age.
Page 127.
An unclassified collection deserved the name “library” as little as a crowd of men deserved to be called an army.
Page 135.
A Key trend in the Enlightenment: the emergence of scientific bibliography and scientific librarians.
Page 137.
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.
Page 137.
Some people should never be allowed near books.
Page 138.
Darwin wrote so many notes in his books that we can now read along with him.
Page 140.
In 1962 Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes shared a thatch-roofed house with their two young children. Unhappy with Hughes’s actual or apparent adultery - perhaps with Assia Wevill or, less plausibly, Moira Doolan - Plath made a bonfire in the backyard. She burned more than a thousand pages of Hughes’s manuscripts, letters, and other valuable papers - all his correspondence, his work in hand, his drafts, his notebooks.
Page 140.
Auction catalogues help trade the movement of books between collections. In so doing, they capture the pulse of accumulation and dispersal, a pulse ardently measured and lived by bibliophiles.
Page 141.
The burning of books has become a symbol of barbarism.
Page 163.
Published texts, no matter how humble or tired or peripheral, still possessed an inviolable potency. They were, as Henry Petroski put it, the basic data of our civilization.
Page 164.
Carrying such enormous cultural and emotional power, the burning of books has become a literary stereotype.
Page 164.
There is no better way to destroy a culture than to destroy its books. Throughout the history of libraries, he wholesale destruction and plunder of books has been an appalling constant.
Page 165.
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.
Page 166.
In August 1814, the invading British set fire to the U.S. Capitol and the 3,000 books of the new Library of Congress, which only a short time before had acquired 740 books in London. (That century there would be two more Library of Congress fires, in 1825 and 1851.)
Page 166.
The Reign of Terror supplied a horrific new material for book-making. Books covered with the skin of executed prisoners were said to be bound in “aristocratic leather.”
Page 167.
In the two decades after the fall of the Bastille, nearly every book in France changed hands.
Page 168.
A precursor to World War II, the Spanish Civil War foreshadowed on a national scale the cultural damage that would be wrought on a global one.
Page 169.
Under Napoleon, books from the greatest libraries of Wester Europe started to reach the Bibliotheque Nationale as “cultural trophies” from the conquered territories.
Page 171.
Public libraries are as effective as cheap hotels at spreading bedbugs.
Page 176.
Many species of animal and fungus are inimical to books.
Page 176.
Over millennia, the animal kingdom of book botherers has included termites, mud wasps, snakes, skunks, foxes, cockroaches, and silverfish. Children and house-pets have done unspeakable things to private libraries. Rats and mice are known to gnaw the backs of books to reach the glue inside. Rodents also nibble vellum bindings, and the pages of vellum books that have become greasy with handling.
Page 176.
Bookworms have been a scourge in libraries since ancient times.
Page 177.
The prohibition of eating and drinking in libraries is less about protecting books from spillages or sticky fingers than it is about discouraging insects and rodents.
Page 178.
The purpose of the first books - those tablets in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt - was to prevent fraud. The recorded ownership, so property was harder to steal, and they recorded transactions, making it harder for sellers and buyers to renege. The vast majority of surviving tablets are lists of items and payments: who owned what, and who paid whom and how much.
Page 186.
We are accustomed to thinking of chained libraries as medieval, and of chains as a feature that fell out of use long before the modern era. And yet, as Burnett Streeter found from his survey, university libraries were still using chains well into the eighteenth century.
Page 187.
A 1998 audit of the Library of Congress revealed a devastating discovery: at least 300,000 titles were missing. In addition, approximately 27,000 illustrations had disappeared form its nineteenth-century books on travel and botany.
Page 188.
The most stolen subject areas in British public libraries were, in decreasing order: sex, telepathy, foreign languages, occult magic, music, and the arts. The ordering differed by place; sex was more popular among thieves in the big cities, occult in the smaller communities.
Page 189.
“A good copy,” “well read,” “not in collectible condition,” “a reading copy” - these are all book-trade euphemisms for clunkers.
Pages 224-225.
Marvelous libraries are a staple of fantasy and science fiction.
Page 231.
Shelves of books are an apt metaphor for communication across time, lining past and future, and an apt signifier of infinity and immortality.
Page 234.
The “larger” late medieval libraries were not very large: the Sorbonne’s collection, for example, one of the world’s largest in the late Middle Ages, numbered only 1,720 volumes in 1332.
Page 237.
In Tolkien’s world, Elvish culture served as an idealized version of ancient Greece and Rome.
Page 246.
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.
Page 249.
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.
Page 252.
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.
Page 257.
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.
Page 258.
The “performance’ of libraries resists evaluation as much as the “customers” of libraries resist classification.
Page 258.
“Investing in a library,” another observer said, “requires an at of faith.” But leaps of faith are precisely what the cost-sphinctering managerialist paradigm is meant to prevent.
Page 259.
The seeming permanence of digital data, though is not entirely reliable. Some digital storages are even more ephemeral than paper ones.
Page 260.
Many aspects of books are alien to digitization: indicators of provenance, marginalia, bindings, paper, watermarks, edition variants, the feel of impressed type, and the physical experience - including the smell - of handling a book; each of these is an intrinsic part of every story of every book.
Page 260.
The rise of digitization has coincided with a rise in physical bibliography and other book-history disciplines that are founded on real, non-digital book-objects.
Page 261.
Browsing books on a screen is utterly alien to the delight of browsing and getting lost in a physical, fractal, serendipitous library of real books.
Page 261.
Without boundaries and selection and navigation, libraries are useless.
Page 262.
Reading a book on-screen or in microfilm was an unsatisfactory experience, like kissing a girl through a windowpane.
Page 262.