by Stuart Kells
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Infinity
CHAPTER 1: A Library with No Books
ORAL TRADITIONS AND THE SONGLINES
The pleasure of books
CHAPTER 2: The Last Days of Alexandria
ANCIENT BOOKS AND THEIR STORAGE
Books in bed
CHAPTER 3: In Pursuit of Perfection
THE RISE OF THE CODEX
Fools in love
CHAPTER 4: ‘A damned sewerful of men’
RENAISSANCE REDISCOVERIES
Mean-spirited collectors
CHAPTER 5: Free for All
THE ABUNDANCE OF BOOKS IN THE PRINTING ERA
Curiosities
CHAPTER 6: ‘What the Barbarians did not do’
THE VATICAN LIBRARY
Delicacies
CHAPTER 7: Secret Histories
TRICKS AND TREASURES IN LIBRARY DESIGN
Found
CHAPTER 8: Keepers of Books
THE BEST AND WORST LIBRARIANS IN HISTORY
Vandals
CHAPTER 9: The Quintessence of Debauchery
HEBER, BYRON AND BARRY
Writers’ libraries
CHAPTER 10: Execration upon Vulcan
LIBRARIES DESTROYED BY FIRE AND WAR
Library fauna
CHAPTER 11: The Count
BOOK LOOTERS AND THIEVES
Book wheels and machines
CHAPTER 12: ‘The interior of a library should whisper’
THE PIERPONT MORGAN LIBRARY
When disaster strikes
CHAPTER 13: For the Glory
THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY
Birth
CHAPTER 14: Killing a Monk
FANTASY LIBRARIES
Death
CHAPTER 15: A Love Letter
LIBRARIES FOR THE FUTURE
Afterlife
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
Copyright
Preface
More than twenty years ago, when I was a young academic working glumly at a social research institute, one of the university colleges held a lunchtime book sale. As soon as I arrived I found a smallish, squarish volume, handsomely printed in old-fashioned type. The binding was distinctively English: dark-blue, straight-grained morocco (a type of goatskin), the spine boldly gilded and segmented with raised bands in the style of Charles Lewis, the great nineteenth-century bookbinder.
The title page revealed the publication date, 1814, and identified the book as Pieces of Ancient Poetry from Unpublished Manuscripts and Scarce Books. I knew ‘ancient’ meant the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and ‘poetry’ covered a breadth of ballads and verse. Otherwise, the book was a little mystery. Just two letters appeared where the author’s name should have been: ‘NY’. Nor was the publisher identified.
A footnote revealed ninety-six copies had been printed, plus six ‘specials’ on blue paper. The book in my hands was one of the six. I turned to the back and read the ‘Disposition of the copies’. Though the book kept secret its author and publisher, it named Sheepshanks, Peckover, Pople and the other subscribers who’d agreed in advance to buy a copy. Several of the listed men were Roxburghers, members of the world’s most illustrious and exclusive bibliophile society: Sir Mark Masterman Sykes (a blue copy and a white copy), Archdeacon Francis Wrangham, Sir Francis Freeling, and (enjoying another book purchase before his imminent bankruptcy) George Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford.
Here, then, in pristine condition and with exceptional pedigree, was a beautifully made and exceptionally scarce collection of rare texts from the time of Shakespeare. In some quarters, leather-bound books are out of fashion. They are ‘brown books’ to go with ‘brown furniture’. But finding Pieces was a perfect life moment, the kind of discovery that explains why bibliophiles spend so many hours at flea markets, bookstalls, car boots and garage sales. Walking home that day, I looked forward to showing the prize to my fiancée, Fiona. We were living in a tower block that used to be a hotel; our apartment still had a minibar-fridge and a wall-mounted hairdryer. Fiona and I grappled with how best to accommodate our VIP guest. Archival box? Shelf to breathe? Would steam from the kitchenette bother the morocco?
Over the following weeks I researched Pieces, consulting in the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne the Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature and a nineteenth-century edition of the Dictionary of National Biography. ‘NY’, it turned out, was John Fry, a young bookseller from Bristol: N and Y are the terminal letters of his first and last names, a common device of ceremonial anonymity. (Fry’s final book was even less anonymous: it identified its editor as ‘J–N F–Y’.)
Fiona and I saved our money and searched for other Frys. Soon, in our tiny flat, we had the world’s best John Fry collection (the Folger Shakespeare Library contained his other works but not Pieces) and we were beginning to appreciate fully our book-sale find. In strictly monetary terms, Pieces was the most valuable thing we owned. But it was more than an asset we could liquidate if we had to. It became for us a talisman. We’d found the nucleus of our future library.
Pieces was also a treasure map, and a portal into multiple strands of a bookish life. John Fry admitted Fiona and me into the circle of gentlemen who, during the reign of King George III, preserved rare books and documents from centuries past. He tutored us on the pillars of good bibliographical method, and exposed us to the most sublime forms of bibliomania. He introduced us to black-letter men, gilt toppers, rough edgers, tall copyists, broadsiders, Aldusians, Elzevirians, Grangerites, pasquinaders and tawny moroccoites. He initiated us into Elizabethanism and invited us to celebrate the edgy side of Shakespeare’s work. And he enlisted us into the search for Shakespeare’s missing library.
The discovery sparked an epiphany somewhere between On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I became a student again, determined to learn everything I needed to become a bookman. Nearby universities offered no degrees in holistic bookmanship. Inspired by Fry and his circle, I improvised my own course, plucking units from literature, psychology, philosophy, art, commerce, curatorship, history, law, logic, mathematics—a mixture that made no sense to anyone but Fiona and me. When eventually I graduated, I walked away with a book about bookselling, a masters in book auctions, a doctorate in law, the untidiest transcript in Christendom, and a bespoke qualification in bibliophilia.
On weekends I started ‘running’ books: driving around with a car full mostly of paperbacks, wholesaling them between bookshops. Fiona and I issued catalogues of highlights from our stock. Every book we bought to sell was a puzzle, a judgment to be backed. We relished the chance to work with objects, not just ideas. For us, this was the beginning of a career in books that saw us working side by side in a publishing house, and issuing with delight a series of books about books. We exhibited at bookfairs, and sold books to venerated libraries such as the Mitchell, the Houghton and the Bodleian, whose users must swear not to remove or deface the objects therein, nor to bring or kindle any fire.
In the course of our work we visited hundreds of libraries. Libraries tidy and chaotic, dry and damp, fragrant and malodorous, welcoming and dangerous, containing nearly every kind of book: loved and neglected, meritorious and meretricious, read and unread. We explored national libraries, working men’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 labours, every volume methodically catalogued and lovingly preserved.
We ventured off-catalogue to make exhilarating discoveries on library shelves, like mislaid pamphlets, overlooked signatures, legendary variants, ext
ra-illustrated rarities and hidden fore-edge paintings. We explored sequestered spaces inside libraries, like the exquisite Shakespeare Room in the State Library of New South Wales, the super-tight spiral staircases deep inside the State Library of Victoria and the panopticon cavity above the vaulted glass dome of the nearby parliamentary library, modelled on the original Reichstag.
We studied the crimes of book owners, such as the farmers who stored in a woolshed a priceless set (forty-one elephant-folio volumes) of John Gould’s marvellous zoological illustrations, and the farmers’ town cousins who stored a unique collection of books and manuscripts in a fireplace. We called on the hoarder who cut an indoor pathway to his bathtub, where his most prized possessions were kept. And we swooned over mediaeval libraries with books shelved spine-inward and attached to chains to prevent escape.
We learned that 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. But libraries are not Platonic abstractions or sterile, hyperbaric chambers. They are human places into which humans cry tears, moult hair, slough skin, sneeze snot and deposit oil from their hands—incidentally the best sustenance for old leather bindings.
How much of themselves did Shakespeare, Donne, Hemingway and Woolf leave behind in their libraries? And how much of their personalities is discernible from their books? 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—indeed every biblical sin and most of the pathologies from the American Psychiatric Association manual.
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.’ John Hill Burton described a book collector whose nervous temperament was so sensitive that he could not tolerate an alien book in proximity to his library; ‘the existence within his dwelling-place of any book not of his own special kind, would impart to him the sort of feeling of uneasy horror which a bee is said to feel when an earwig comes into its cell.’
Collectors, having acquired and arranged their books through whichever means, have used every kind of simile to describe 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. John Baxter imagined the books in his Graham Greene collection rustling and rubbing against each other every night like a colony of insects.
Libraries provide ideal habitats for real insects, which are attracted to quiet, darkish, starchy places. Fiona and I have seen whole shelves of books destroyed by burrowing worms. For me, now, the mounds and trails they left behind are the stuff of genuinely horrifying nightmares. We’ve also seen whole collections ruined by grazing silverfish, the bibliophile’s nemesis. Those monsters relish pulpy paper and the crunchy starch in book glue and book cloth. Seemingly preferring richer inks, they devastate dust jackets with tracks that look fiendishly deliberate.
From our visits to libraries we’ve learned much about the integrity of shelves. Smooth, strong and open are best. Sagging shelves deform books in to painful, non-Euclidean shapes. Abrasive shelves wear away at leather bindings. Books behind glass get sick from breathing their own air. Above all, we’ve learned that 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.
Pieces would be the first in a series of marvellous finds, several of which come instantly to mind. Found piled in a bedroom bookcase on an appraisal visit to a suburban home: two 1625 George Chapman plays, quarto format, in immaculate condition and bound together by one of the world’s finest bookbinders, Riviere & Son. At the bottom of a dusty box in a country bookshop: a pre-revolutionary French royal binding, in wonderful condition and with spectacular provenance and rarity. In a second-hand store: Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s luxurious catalogue of Lord Spencer’s library at Althorp—the catalogue in which Dibdin glamourised the 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the ‘First Folio’.
Though John Fry died nearly two centuries ago, and though it would be years before I properly understood his work in context, he became my bookworld mentor, imparting his fascination with the print culture of early-modern England. Under his influence I would write and publish about Shakespeare, and join the search for Elizabethan and Jacobean treasures. I would explore the greatest libraries and the infinite byways of bibliomania. All the while, a young bookseller from Bristol, long dead, would be my counsellor and guide. This kind of practical immortality is a large part of why people love books. And why we write them.
Infinity
In 1937, at the age of thirty-eight, Jorge Luis Borges started his first regular full-time job: the ‘menial and dismal’ work of re-cataloguing books at the Miguel Cané municipal library in the Boedo district of Buenos Aires. He worked surrounded by violent, lazy and loutish colleagues. Often he would disappear to a quiet part of the library and attempt to write. On the way home each day, he walked ten blocks to the tramline, his eyes ‘filled with tears’.
In 1938, on Christmas Eve, Borges ran upstairs and accidentally split his head open on a window casement. Elizabeth Hyde Stevens has described how the wound became poisoned and Borges spent the next week in a sleepless delirium. Suspended between life and death, he was unable to speak—until his mother brought him back to sentience by reading aloud from a book he’d ordered. ‘On that miraculous day, she looked up from reading C. S. Lewis, noticing he had begun to cry. In perfect speech, he told her, “I’m crying because I understand”.’
One of the first pieces he wrote after his recovery was a short story titled ‘The Library of Babel’; Borges called it ‘a nightmare version or magnification’ of the hellish Miguel Cané municipal library. The heart of the story is a remarkable vision of a universe consisting of an infinite library composed of interconnected hexagonal rooms, all the same size, all with bookshelves whose dimensions—thirty-five books per shelf, five shelves per side, twenty shelves per floor—mirrored those of the Miguel Cané.
The books themselves are standardised, too. Each one is 410 pages long; each page has forty lines; each line about eighty letters, which are limited to twenty-two phonic characters plus the full-stop and the comma and the space. The books’ distribution among the hexagons is apparently random, though many theories exist about the distribution, and many attempts are made to find patterns in the randomness. Most of the books seem to be gibberish, but the library must contain, in every language, every book ever written, every book that might ever be written, and every possible version of every one of those books: detailed histories of the past and the future; faithful and unfaithful catalogues of the library; lost gospels, commentaries and apocrypha; the lost books of Tacitus; ‘the treatise the Venerable Bede might have written (and never wrote) on Saxon mythology’; true and false accounts of your death…
This metaphor of infinite libraries has been expressed in countless other ways: every possible combination of musical notes; infinite cabinets of things; the set of possible protein sequences; the set of possible mystery-novel plots; tabulations of the secret name of God; the world, nature and Google as universal libraries; the Bible, the Koran, the First Folio and Finnegans Wake as universal texts; monkeys with typewriters; pan-dimensional cryptographs; automatic writing; continuous narratives; nameless cities; formal depictions of mathematical and quantum indeterminacy; the mare incognitum and terra nullius; the set of all possible tweets. A page of pixels can be used to create not just every page of text, bu
t every image as well. In principle, solids can be sliced into infinitely narrower planes.
In Borges’s story, the Library of Babel is an endless subject of wonder for the civilisations that have grown up in its rooms and on its stairs. They construct legends and cults, they debate their theories, they explore the vast expanses of the labyrinth, and, when driven to despair, they jump to fast-slow deaths in the bottomless air shafts that stand between the hexagons.
For nine unhappy years, Borges remained at the Miguel Cané library. Partly on the strength of his literary reputation, he would escape to become director of the National Library of Buenos Aires—a position he remained in for eighteen happier years. Though he lost his sight in his early fifties, he refused to carry a cane and he continued to work. He also continued to visit bookshops. According to Alberto Manguel, who worked at Labach’s bookshop in Buenos Aires, Borges would pass a hand over the shelves as though his fingers could see the titles. On one visit to Labach’s, Borges was accompanied by his octogenarian mother. The author-librarian searched for mediaeval English texts. ‘Oh Georgie,’ Señora Borges said, ‘I don’t know why you waste your time with Anglo-Saxon instead of studying something useful like Latin or Greek!’
CHAPTER 1
A Library with No Books
Oral traditions and the songlines
If a library can be something as simple as an organised collection of texts, 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. Warehoused as memories, these texts passed from generation to generation through dance, gesture and word of mouth. The Kope of New Guinea, the Mandinka griots of Mali, the Ifugao of the Philippines, the Arabs of Palestine, the nomads of Mongolia, the Nambikwara of Brazil, and the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en of British Columbia—these and other peoples used narrative forms such as Hudhud chants, Hikaye stories, Urtiin duu and Bogino duu (long and short songs) to maintain their immaterial libraries.