Several examples of literatura de cordel.
The broader the category, the less circumscribed the book. In China, at the beginning of the third century, the books in the Imperial Library were kept under four modest and comprehensive headings agreed upon by eminent court scholars—canonical or classical texts, works of history, philosophical works, and miscellaneous literary works—each bound in a specific and symbolic colour, respectively green, red, blue and grey (a chromatic division curiously akin to that of the early Penguins or the Spanish Colección Austral). Within these groupings, the titles were shelved following graphic or phonetic orderings. In the first case, many thousands of characters were broken into a few basic elements—the ideogram for earth or water, for instance—and then placed in a conventional order that followed the hierarchies of Chinese cosmology. In the second, the order was based on the rhyme of the last syllable of the last word in a title. Equivalent to the Roman alphabetical system, which fluctuates between 26 (English) and 28 (Spanish) letters, the number of possible rhymes in Chinese varied between 76 and 206. The largest manuscript encyclopedia in the world, the Yongle Dadian, or Monumental Compendium from the Era of Eternal Happiness, commissioned in the fifteenth century by the Emperor Chengzu with the purpose of recording in one single publication all existing Chinese literature, used the rhyming method to order its thousands of entries. Over two thousand scholars worked on the ambitious enterprise. Only a small portion of that monstrous catalogue survives today.42
Entering a library, I am always struck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order. Some categories, of course, are more evident than others, and Chinese libraries in particular have a long history of classification that reflects, in its variety, the changing ways in which China has conceived the universe. The earliest catalogues follow the hierarchy imposed by a belief in the supreme rule of the gods, beneath whose primordial, all-encompassing vault—the realm of the heavenly bodies—stands the subservient earth. Then, in decreasing order of importance, come human beings, animals, plants and, lastly, minerals. These six categories govern the divisions under which the works of 596 authors, preserved in 13,269 scrolls, are classified in the first-century bibliographic study known as the Hanshu Yiwenzhi, or Dynastic History of the Han, an annotated catalogue based on the research of two imperial librarians, Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin,43 who, alone, dedicated their lives to recording what others had written. Other Chinese catalogues stem from different hierarchies. The Cefu Yuangui, or Archives of the Divinatory Tortoise, compiled by imperial command between 1005 and 1013, follows not a cosmic order but rather a bureaucratic one, beginning with the emperor and descending through the various state officials and institutions down to lowly citizens.44 (In Western terms, we could conceive of a library of English literature that began, for instance, with the Prayers and Poems of Elizabeth I and ended with the complete works of Charles Bukowski.) This bureaucratic or sociological order was employed to assemble one of the first Chinese encyclopedias to call itself exhaustive: the Taiping Yulan, or Imperial Readings from the Era of the Great Peace. Finished in 982, it explored all fields of knowledge; its sequel, Vast Compendium from the Era of the Great Peace, covered under fifty-five subject-headings more than five thousand biographical entries, and listed over two thousand titles. Song Taizong, the emperor who commanded its writing, is said to have read three chapters a day for one whole year. A more complex ordering system appears in what is known as the largest encyclopedia ever printed: the Qinding Gujin Tushu Jicheng, or Great Illustrated Imperial Encyclopedia of Past and Present Times, of 1726, a gigantic biographical library divided into more than ten thousand sections. The work was attributed to Jiang Tingxi, a court proofreader who used wooden blocks with cut-out pictures and movable characters specially designed for the enterprise. Each section of the encyclopedia covers one specific realm of human concern, such as Science or Travel, and is divided into subsections containing biographical entries. The section on Human Relations, for instance, lists the biographies of thousands of men and women according to their occupation or position in society, among them sages, slaves, playboys, tyrants, doctors, calligraphers, supernatural beings, great drinkers, notable archers and widows who did not marry again.45
One of the volumes of the monumental Yongle Dadian encyclopedia.
Five centuries earlier, in Iraq, the renowned judge Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Khalikan had compiled a similar “mirror of the world.” His Obituaries of Celebrities and Reports of the Sons of Their Time encompassed 826 biographies of poets, rulers, generals, philologists, historians, prose writers, traditionalists, preachers, ascetics, viziers, Koranic expositors, philosophers, physicians, theologians, musicians and judges—providing, among other features, the subject’s sexual preferences, professional merits and social standing. Because Khalikan’s “biographical library” was meant to “entertain as well as edify,” he omitted from his great work entries on the Prophet and his companions.46 Unlike the Chinese encyclopedias, Khalikan’s opus was arranged in alphabetical order.
The alphabetical classification of books was first used over twenty-two centuries ago, by Callimachus, one of the most notable librarians of Alexandria, a poet admired by Propertius and Ovid, and the author of over eight hundred books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the most important Greek authors in the Library.47 Ironically, given that he so laboriously strove to preserve the works of the past for future readers, all that remains of Callimachus’s own work today is six hymns, sixty-four epigrams, a fragment of a little epic and, most important, the method he used to catalogue his voluminous readings. Callimachus had devised a system for his critical inventory of Greek literature that divided the material into tables or pinakes, one for each genre: epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, medicine, rhetoric, law and, finally, a grab-bag of miscellany.48 Callimachus’s main contribution to the art of keeping books, inspired perhaps by methods employed in the vanished Mesopotamian libraries, was to list the chosen authors alphabetically, with biographical notes and a bibliography (also alphabetically ordered) appended to each consecrated name. I find it moving to think that, were Callimachus to wander into my library, he would be able to find the two volumes of what remains of his own works, in the Loeb series, by following the method he himself conceived to shelve the works of others.
The alphabetical system entered the libraries of Islam by way of Callimachus’s catalogues. The first such work composed in the Arab world, in imitation of the pinakes, was the Book of Authors, by the Baghdad bookseller Abu Tahir Tayfur, who died in A.D. 893. Though only the title has come down to us, we know that the writers selected by Tayfur were each given a short biography and a catalogue of important works listed in alphabetical order.49 About the same time, Arab scholars in various learning centres, concerned with lending order to Plato’s dialogues so as to facilitate translation and commentaries, discovered that Callimachus’s alphabetic method, which enabled readers to find a certain author in his allotted shelf, did not lend the same rigour to the placement of the texts themselves. Consulting the various bibliographies of Plato’s work compiled by the long-gone librarians of Alexandria, they discovered to their astonishment that these ancient sages, in spite of following Callimachus’s system, had rarely been in agreement as to what went where. All had agreed that Plato’s works, for example, were to be classified under “P,” but in what order or within which subgroupings? The scholarly Aristophanes of Byzantium, for instance, had gathered Plato’s work in triads (excluding several dialogues for no clear reason), while the learned Thrasylus had divided what he assumed to be “the genuine dialogues” into sets of four, saying that Plato himself had always “published his dialogues in tetralogies.”50 Other librarians had listed the collected works in one single grouping but in different sequences, some beginning with the Apology, others with the Republic, others still with Phaedrus or Timaeus. My library suffers from the same confusion. Since my authors are listed in
alphabetical order, all of Margaret Atwood’s books are to be found under the letter “A,” on the third shelf down of the English language section, but I don’t pay much attention to whether Life before Man precedes Cat’s Eye (for the sake of respecting the chronology), or Morning in the Burned House follows Oryx and Crake (separating her poetry from her fiction).
In spite of such minor frailties, the Arab libraries that flourished in the late Middle Ages were catalogued using alphabetical order. It would otherwise have been impossible to consult a repertoire of books as lengthy as that of the Nizamiyya College in Damascus, where, we are told, a Christian scholar was able to peruse, in 1267, the fifty-sixth volume of a catalogue that listed nothing but works on several subjects “written during the Islamic period up to the reign of Caliph Mustansir in 1241.”51
If a library is a mirror of the universe, then a catalogue is a mirror of that mirror. While in China the notion of listing all a library’s books between the covers of a single book was imagined almost from the start, in the Arab world it did not become common until the fifteenth century, when catalogues and encyclopedias frequently bore the name “Library.” The greatest of these annotated catalogues, however, was compiled at a much earlier date. In 987, Ibn al-Nadim (of whom we know little, except that he was probably a bookseller in the service of the Abbasid rulers of Baghdad) set out to assemble
the catalogue of all the books of all peoples, Arab and foreigners, existing in the Arab tongue, as well as their writings on the various sciences, together with an account of the life of those who composed them and the social standing of these authors with their genealogies, the date of their birth, the length of their life, the time of their death, and their cities of origin, their virtues and their faults, from the beginning of the invention of each science up to our own age, the year 377 of the Hegira.
Al-Nadim did not work only from previous bibliographies; his intention, he tells us in his preface, is to “see for himself” the works in question. For this purpose he visited as many libraries as he had knowledge of, “opening volume after volume and reading through scroll after scroll.” This all-encompassing work, known as the Fihrist, is in fact the best compendium we have of medieval Arab knowledge; it combines in one volume “memory and inventory” and is “a library in its own right.”52
The Fihrist is a unique literary creation. It does not follow Callimachus’s alphabetical order, nor is it divided according to the location of the volumes it lists. Meticulously chaotic and delightfully arbitrary, it is the bibliographical record of a boundless library dispersed throughout the world and visible only in the shape al-Nadim chose to give it. In its pages, religious texts sit side by side with profane ones, scientific works grounded in arguments of authority are listed together with writings belonging to what al-Nadim called the rational sciences, while Islamic studies are paired with studies of the beliefs of foreign nations.53 Both the unity and the variety of the Fihrist lie in the eye and mind of its omnivorous author.
But a reader’s ambition knows no bounds. A century later, the vizier Abul-Qasim al-Maghribi, dissatisfied with what he deemed to be an incomplete work, composed a Complement to the Catalogue of al-Nadim that extended the already inconceivable repertory to an even more astonishing length. The volumes listed in this exaggerated catalogue were likewise, of course, never collected in one place.
Looking for more practical ways to find their path through a maze of books, Arab librarians often allowed themes and disciplines to override the strictures of the alphabetical system and to impose subject divisions on the physical space itself. Such was the library visited towards 980 by a contemporary of al-Nadim, the distinguished doctor Abou Ali El-Hossein Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. Paying a visit to his patient the Sultan of Bukhara, in what is today Uzbekistan, Avicenna discovered a library conveniently divided into scholarly subjects of all sorts. “I entered a building of many rooms,” he tells us.
In each room there were chests full of books, piled one on top of the other. In one room were poetry books in Arabic, in another books of law, and so forth; each room was given over to books of one specific science. I consulted the catalogue of Ancient Works [i.e., Greek] and asked the librarian, keeper of the live memory of the books, for what I wanted. I saw books whose very titles are for the most part unknown, books I had never seen before and which I have never seen since. I read these books and I profited from them, and I was able to recognize each one’s position inside its proper scientific category.54
These thematic divisions were commonly used together with the alphabetical system in the Islamic Middle Ages. The subjects themselves varied, as did the place in which the books were kept, whether open shelves, closed cupboards or (as in the case of the Bukhara Library) wooden chests. Only the category of sacred books—the Koran, in a variety of copies—was always kept separate, since the word of God is not to be mixed with the word of men.
The cataloguing methods of the Library of Alexandria, with its space organized according to the letters of the alphabet and its books subjected to hierarchies imposed by the selected bibliographies, reached far beyond the borders of Egypt. Even the rulers of Rome created libraries in Alexandria’s image. Julius Caesar, who had lived in Alexandria and had certainly frequented the Library, sought to establish in Rome “the finest possible public library,” and charged Marcus Terence Varro (who had written an unreliable handbook of library science, quoted approvingly by Pliny) “to collect and classify all manner of Greek and Latin books.”55 The task was not carried out until after Caesar’s death; in the first years of the reign of Augustus, Rome’s first public library was opened by Asinius Pollio, a friend of Catullus, Horace and Virgil. It was housed in the so-called Atrium of Freedom (its exact location has not yet been established) and decorated with portraits of famous writers.
Roman libraries like that of Asinius Pollio, specially designed to suit the learned reader in spite of names such as “Atrium of Freedom,” must have felt powerfully like a place of containment and order. The earliest remains we have of such a library were unearthed on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Because Roman book collections such as Pollio’s were bilingual, architects had to design in duplicate the buildings housing them. The Palatine ruins, for instance, reveal one chamber for Greek works and one for works in Latin, each with openings for statues and deep niches for wooden bookcases (armaria), while the walls appear to have been lined with shelves and protected by doors. The armaria were labelled and their codes inscribed in the catalogues next to the titles of the books they contained. Flights of stairs allowed readers to reach the different thematic areas and, since some of the shelves were higher than arm’s length, portable steps were available for those who required them. A reader would have picked up the desired scroll, aided perhaps by the cataloguing librarian, and unfurled it on one of the tables in the middle of the room, to examine it in the midst of a communal mumbling, in the days before silent reading became common, or carried it out and read it under the colonnade, as was customary in the libraries of Greece.56
But this is only guesswork. The single depiction we have of a Roman library derives from a line drawing, made in the nineteenth century, of a relief from the Augustan period found in Neumagen, Germany, and now lost.57 It shows the scrolls lying in tiers of three on deep shelves, probably in alphabetical order within their subject section, their triangular identifying tags clearly visible to the reader, who is stretching his right arm towards them. Unfortunately, the titles on the tags cannot be read. As in any library I visit, I am curious to know what the books are, and even here, faced with the image of an image of a long-vanished collection, my eyes peer into the drawing, trying to make out the names of those ancient scrolls.
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiplies seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts. Whether in Alexandria, Baghdad or Rome, this expanding mass of words eventually requires syste
ms of classification that allow it space to grow, movable fences that save it from being restricted by the limits of the alphabet or rendered useless by the sheer quantity of items it might hold under a categorical label.
Engraving copied from a no longer extant Roman bas-relief, depicting the method for storing scrolls.
Numbers seem perhaps better suited than letters or subject-headings to maintain order in this unstoppable growth. Even in the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys realized that, to allow for this surfeit, the infinite universe of numbers was more efficient than the alphabet, and he enumerated his volumes for his “easy finding them to read.”58 The numerical classification I remember from my visits to the school library (and the one most widely used throughout the world) is Dewey’s, which lends the spines of books the aspect of licence plates on rows of parked cars.
Portrait of Melvil Dewey.
Melvil Dewey’s story is a curious combination of a generous vision and narrow views. In 1873, while still a student at Amherst College, Massachusetts (where he soon after became acting librarian), the twenty-two-year-old Dewey realized the need for a system of classification that would combine both common sense and practicality. He disliked arbitrary methods, such as that of the New York State Library he had frequented, by which books were arranged alphabetically but “paying no attention to subjects,” and so he set himself the task of conceiving a better system. “For months I dreamed night and day that there must be somewhere a satisfactory solution,” he wrote fifty years later. “One Sunday during a long sermon … the solution flasht over me so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting ‘Eureka!’ Use decimals to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”59
The Library at Night Page 4