by Stuart Kells
Reading one book while recalling another was, according to the poet Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, one of the most delicate forms of adultery. 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.
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. Commenting on a friend’s library in the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris complained that pagan authors were separated from Christian ones, ‘the pagans near the gentlemen’s seats, the Christians near the ladies’. In a similar spirit, an 1863 book of etiquette and deportment instructed book owners to segregate the works of male and female authors, ‘unless they happen to be married’.
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.’ 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 from their human spouses. To avoid that necessity, the author and librarian A. N. L. ‘Tim’ Munby advised new and prospective husbands that the ‘education’ of wives must be started early: ‘a visit to at least one bookshop a day throughout the honeymoon is to be recommended.’ In 1917 Margaret Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, married the surgeon and bookman Geoffrey Keynes. When the honeymooners visited a bookshop, Margaret complained of feeling faint. Geoffrey ‘took her outside and made her comfortable, then went back to finish the shop’. A long and happy marriage followed.
(Geoffrey’s older brother was the famous economist John Maynard Keynes. A member of the liberated Bloomsbury group, Maynard married a ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. Serious and introverted Geoffrey found playful and outgoing Lydia utterly baffling. At Maynard’s funeral in 1946, Geoffrey wore a black coat and striped trousers. ‘Oh, Geoffrey,’ Lydia said, ‘you look so sexy.’ Afterwards, Geoffrey asked several of his friends, ‘What can she have meant?’)
An excessive attachment to books can be dangerous. Desiderius Erasmus had clear priorities. ‘When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.’ The French philologist and lawyer Salmasius asked to be locked inside the library at Heidelberg. There he remained for forty-eight hours with neither food nor drink—sustained only by his proximity to treasured books. Leigh Hunt recorded how Elizabeth West, wife of the painter Benjamin West, was so fond of books she became a martyr to them, her physician declaring ‘she lost the use of her limbs by sitting indoors reading’. The Greek philosopher Carneades ‘was so deeply plunged in an overweening desire for knowledge, so besotted with it, that he never had leisure to cut his hair, or pare his nails’. The philologist Budaeus showed his commitment in a different way. When a servant rushed into his study to warn him that the house was on fire, Budaeus replied, ‘Tell my wife that I never interfere with the household,’ and he went on reading.
CHAPTER 2
The Last Days of Alexandria
Ancient books and their storage
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 from the cluster of Germanic languages that includes Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse and Old English. Both roots, though, have similar meanings: liber is bark, bece beech wood. Both etymologies relate to forest materials for book-making. The meaning of these roots is important. 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.
Around 1200 BC, Rameses II assembled a great library of books that included all the principal book materials available in the Nile Valley. More than ten types of book were represented, among them volumes made from papyrus, palm leaves, bone, bark, ivory, linen and stone. A single snapshot in 5000 years of bookish experimentation, Rameses’s collection could only ever tell part of the story. In other lands and other times, books would also be made from silk, gems, plastic, silicon, bamboo, hemp, rags, glass, grass, wood, wax, rubber, enamel, iron, copper, silver, gold, turtle shell, antlers, hair, rawhide and the intestines of elephants.
In the making of books, local availability long dictated what materials would be used, and to what extent; local abundance enabled abundant use. The banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates were heavy with clay, so Mesopotamian scribes naturally used it to make their books. In the Nile Valley, however, clay was scarce—the very first Egyptian tablets were made from bone and ivory. Later Egyptian books, in scroll format, used the plentiful pith of the Nile papyrus. In China, long before Europe, paper was made in large quantities from the abundant bamboo and the by-products of everyday life.
The ancient city of Pergamum, in what is now Turkey, lay at the centre of a region of cattle, sheep and goat grazing. Animal skins for making parchment were therefore plentiful. Experimentally at first, parchment was used to supply Pergamum’s large library. At that time, there was already a long history of people using animal parts to keep written records; animals had given much in the history of the book, and they would give much more still. Parchment is made by washing and stretching a split skin and rubbing it smooth. A single flawless sheep yields one folio sheet. As Lewis Buzbee noted in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, twenty skins might be needed to make a small book, ‘but you could eat the leftovers. And yes, that’s why a diploma is called a sheepskin.’ In the year 1000, an average-sized book consumed the skins of dozens, even hundreds of animals. A 1000-page bible, for example, needed 250 sheep. In Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D’Israeli marvelled that the volumes written by Zoroaster, entitled The Similitude, were said to have taken up the space of 1260 cattle hides. The largest surviving mediaeval manuscript, the Codex Gigas or Devil’s Bible, is thought to have been made from the skins of 160 donkeys.
Quality issues always loom large when using animal hides, especially those of wild animals. Kangaroo skins, for example, have been used for bookbinding, but their quality is notoriously variable. Male kangaroos have long, scraping claws. Raw roo leather often arrives scratched and scored with what are known in the leather trade as ‘mating marks’. In the Middle Ages, scribes sometimes had to work with parchment that was similarly holed by wounds or insects. Some blemishes were repaired with silk thread, others incorporated into the illuminator’s design. At Durham there is a delightful gospel book, dating from the seventh or eighth century, in which the improvising scribe has carefully decorated the edges of several insect bites.
Vellum, the most deluxe and tragic form of parchment—made from the skin of bovine foetuses—is smooth, white and highly workable. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, the illustrious nineteenth-century bibliographer and book kisser, regarded vellum-bound books as the pinnacle of bookish treasure. He called them ‘membranaceous bijoux’. Vellum is also highly durable. When Tim Munby was librarian at Cambridge University’s King’s College, he co-owned a 1925 type 40 Bugatti, ‘which was regularly taken to pieces by the roadside’. On one trip, when one of the car’s gaskets kept blowing, Munby had a few of his own rare manuscripts to hand. After a process of experimentation, the gasket turned out to respond to vellum. An old antiphonal that had been ruined by water was cut up and put to use,
and this, when enthusiasts asked the Bugatti’s age, enabled one to indulge in a little piece of lifemanship and reply nonchalantly, ‘Parts of it date back to the fifteenth century.’
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 BC), were the location for two important beginnings: the inception of Western scholarship, and the creation of architectural features—spaces for reading, writing and conversing—that distinguish all subsequent academic, monastic and public libraries through the classical era to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and beyond.
Five centuries after the Athenian library boom, the same sequence was repeated in Rome: plentiful papyrus led to a flourishing of Roman book-making and library formation. (Conversely, a second-century Ptolemaic embargo on Egyptian papyrus exports caused difficulties for writers and readers throughout the classical world.) The pattern would continue. In early Christian times, increased supplies of parchment—favoured as a more reliable alternative to papyrus—made possible the monastic output of codices. Along with printing, the greater use of paper in the sixteenth century underwrote the spectacular literary output of Elizabethan England.
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The library of Rameses II contained books made from papyrus but not from true paper; book-makers would not use that material until much later. But the library did contain clay tablets, which had been imported from the Fertile Crescent to the northeast. Dating from before 3100 BC, the very first libraries of physical books are thought to have appeared in that region. The libraries were modest storerooms, containing tens of thousands of square and rectangular clay tablets, each one about half the length of a tjurunga stone, each one covered with markings. The tablets were carefully organised on shelves and in trays. Tablet rooms at Ebla, Mari and Uruk are examples of these simple libraries. Throughout Mesopotamia, scribes used a complex script, known as ‘cuneiform’, to write Akkadian, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Urartian—a total of fifteen languages from the nursery of civilisation, the area of modern-day Syria, Iraq and western Iran.
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. In Hyde’s 1700 book on Persia, for example, the double professor confessed he regretted the survival of the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis because they were a triviality, ‘likely to waste a lot of people’s time’. The inscriptions, he said, proved cuneiform could not be writing: the characters in the inscriptions were never repeated; they must just have been a playful experiment, an attempt to see how many different combinations the artist could create from a single element—a set of signs, in other words, as unhelpful as the mysterious Voynich manuscript or the nonsense books in Borges’s infinite library.
The doubters, however, were wrong. Today, not only can we understand the writing, we can even pronounce the words, more or less as they were spoken thousands of years ago. Apart from official records, the cuneiform tablets captured epic poems and stories—such as the tale of Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh—that had first been composed long before the arrival of writing. In the twentieth century, the earliest Albatross and Penguin paperbacks were colour-coded by genre. In contrast, the first clay tablets were shape-coded: square for financial accounts, round for farming records, and so on. Some featured both text and images, making them the first illustrated books.
Tablets of special importance received special protection. Each one of a group of Assyrian tablets, now in the British Museum, was encased in a clay shell. Readers could only access the tablets by breaking the shells—the very first book covers—like walnuts. Just as the Mesopotamians did, the first Egyptian scribes made tablets, but they used different materials and a different script, namely hieroglyphics. That iconic, pictorial script was first used at around the same time as cuneiform, and seems to have been influenced by it, though the relationship between the two scripts is not at all clear. Cuneiform’s precedence over hieroglyphics was for many years a settled question in academia. Recent discoveries, though, have thrown the order of invention into contention. The debate is lively, and palaeographers have begun taking sides.
Both camps can point to early stories about the invention of writing. A Sumerian legend gives that invention to Enmerkar, lord of Kulaba. He is said to have sent an emissary to another lord to ask for materials with which to rebuild the residence of the goddess Inanna. The emissary ferried back and forth between the two lords, passing on their messages, until he lost track—Enmerkar’s instructions became too difficult to memorise. According to this story, the lord of Kulaba invented writing so he could be sure his messages were getting through. The myth on the Egyptian side contains some familiar characters. According to Plato, Socrates told Phaedrus that the Egyptian god Theuth invented writing, and demonstrated it to the god Thamous (Amon) as a means to ‘increase the intelligence of the people of Egypt and improve their memories’. Neither story is very helpful to the debate: Enmerkar existed too late—more than four centuries after the first Mesopotamian tablet books—and Theuth probably never existed at all.
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 known as capsae. One of these is shown in a beautiful fresco at Herculaneum, near Pompeii. 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.
Much is known about how scrolls were produced, and about who did what in the production process. The librarii copied the author’s manuscript; the librarioli ornamented the copies and supplied titles and other ancillary matter; and the bibliopegi bound the copies by evening up the margins, squaring the ends, polishing the blank sides with pumice, and attaching wooden rods (taller than the scroll was wide) to each end—these aided rolling and reading, and helped protect the scroll from damage. The rods could also be slotted into a desk to keep the scroll open.
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. Around 300 BC, the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic dynasty founded the Great Library of Alexandria inside the fortified walls of the royal palace, on a spit of land between an intertidal lake and the manmade port at Pharos. The library’s bibliothekai or bookshelves were probably set in recesses along a wide covered passageway. The precise layout of the collections is uncertain, but the Italian classicist and historian Luciano Canfora surmised, ‘Every niche or recess must have been dedicated to a certain class of authors, each marked with an appropriate heading.’ Above the bibliothekai was an inscription: ‘The place of the cure of the soul.’
The library adopted an admirably inclusive and international ambition: to assemble books from all the known countries and in all the languages. During the third century BC, Ptolemy III sent messages to kings, lords and rajas asking for books to copy. 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.
The library was also the venue for important translations, such as rendering the Torah from Biblical Hebrew into Greek—the famous Septuagint. Ptolemy II Philadelphus was behind this project. He asked seventy-two Jewish scholars to undertake the translation. According to the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud, a miracle of congruency followed.
King Ptolemy once gathered seventy-two Elders. He placed them in seventy
-two chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one’s room and said: ‘Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.’ God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.
Philo of Alexandria suggested that the number of scholars was determined by selecting six scholars from each of the twelve tribes of Israel.
The internationalism of Alexandria’s acquisitions policy had a Sumerian antecedent. Discovered in 1849 by the amateur archaeologist and adventurer Henry Layard, the royal library at Nineveh was an attempt by King Ashurbanipal to collect all available knowledge in one place. The Ptolemies picked up where Ashurbanipal left off. At its peak, Alexandria’s library held hundreds of thousands of scrolls. Some accounts have put the number at half a million, others 1 million, plus another 40,000 in a building attached to the Temple of Serapis, in the old Egyptian quarter of Rhakotis.
Despite the labels on the outside of Alexandria’s scrolls, readers struggled to find specific volumes—there were just too many books. A solution, though, was at hand. The famous poet and teacher Callimachus of Cyrene would help keep the books in order, and help scholars navigate through the collections. In other words, he would be a librarian.
From ancient writers such as Strabo, Athenaeus, Epiphanius and the Byzantine authorities Suidas and Tzetzes, we know much about the operations of Alexandria’s library. The so-called Oxyrhynchus fragment no. 1241 is especially informative. That damaged fragment is from a group of papyri discovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at a site near the modern Egyptian town of el-Bahnasa. The site was an ancient rubbish dump. Like other landfill found there, the manuscripts span the first six centuries AD. They include thousands of Greek and Latin books and documents. Dating from the second century and written in a careful uncial script, the anonymously authored fragment 1241 is ‘a characteristic product of the Alexandrian erudition which exercised itself in antiquarian research and tabulation’. Along with military and mythological information, and short catalogues of famous sculptors and painters and grammarians, the document contains a priceless chronological list of the head librarians at Alexandria.