by Stuart Kells
Many scribes in the classical world were slaves. Now, in the monastic scriptoria, the scribes were free men, more or less, who took pride in their work. The tradition of elaborate, exuberant pictorial frontispieces and initials arose in this spirit of individual creativity. Even the most senior priests participated in manuscript production. The very act of carefully copying out texts by forming each stroke and each letter by hand was itself an act of observance and devotion. As Lewis Buzbee observed, ‘the books that held the true word incarnate had to be works of art.’ The scribes toiled at lecterns arranged like church pews. Manuscript production was holy work.
‘Illuminated’ manuscripts were the height of the mediaeval scribe’s art. Illumination refers to the use of elaborate decoration—initial letters, frontispieces, marginal decoration—and rich colours such as red, purple, lapis lazuli, and especially silver and gold. (In pre-modern times, lapis lazuli came from as far away as Afghanistan, while purple ink was derived from the glands of Mediterranean snails. About one and a half grams of the dye cost 12,000 snails their lives.) The talented and inventive monks created enchanting images, sometimes with microscopic precision. Rabbits, cats and mice frolicking and murdering each other in the margins. Intricate lacework patterns that explicitly recall the masterpieces of Celtic enamelwork. Cartoonish caricatures and drolleries with startling vitality. Despite many tragic losses, thousands of painted manuscripts have survived to the present day. Indeed, the manuscripts that accounted for a large proportion of monastic effort now account for a large proportion of the extant artistic output of the Middle Ages—and of our knowledge of what delighted, appalled and terrified the people of the time.
The seventh-century volume known as the Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the most marvellous illuminated manuscripts to survive from the Middle Ages. The initial page of the Gospel of St Luke features 10,600 dots of red lead: these alone would’ve taken the illuminator at least six intently focused hours to apply. The scribe Eadfrith, the Lindisfarne monastery’s future bishop, was a master of manuscript illumination. He was responsible for many of the gospels’ finest illustrations, most notably the interwoven Celtic ‘carpet’ designs of exceptional complexity and beauty. But Eadfrith introduced deliberate errors into his designs: an interlocking pattern of the wrong colour, a bird lacking its wing, and so on. These have been interpreted as a way to stop just short of perfection—because perfection was the preserve of the Creator.
For almost 1000 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 100 books. Not until the end of the Middle Ages were monastic libraries likely to have more than two or three hundred. The Italian monastery of Bobbio was an exception. Founded by Irish monks, it housed 666 manuscripts in the tenth century—still a very modest number compared to the libraries of classical times, and compared to the myth, popularised in fiction and film, of the extensive mediaeval library. In 1200, the ‘large’ mediaeval library at Durham—equally exceptional—numbered only 570 volumes. After the fall of Rome, 1000 years would pass before western libraries had as many codices as Herculaneum had scrolls.
Some large libraries did flourish in the middle of the Middle Ages. Those libraries were in the Arab world and the far east. In the year 1011, Korean monks founded the Tripitaka Koreana—a library of over 80,000 immaculate woodblocks for printing a complete set of the Buddhist scriptures. The greatest libraries of mediaeval Islam rose in Cordoba, Baghdad, Cairo and Fez. They held thousands of scrolls and codices but, by the end of the twelfth century, these had largely been scattered.
In mediaeval Christian libraries, the first codices were kept in chests and on lecterns rather than in bookcases. 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—the abundance of Alexandria and its labelled scrolls was a distant memory, if remembered at all. Whenever a mediaeval scholar wished to consult a book, he or she could know which book was which by its size, shape, colour and placement. (Book spines in the infinite Library of Babel are labelled, but with random letters unconnected to the books’ contents except by chance.)
Typically, monastic codices were much larger than run-of-the-mill modern books. The heaviest book at the Benedictine monastery of St Gall weighed 22.5 kilograms. The Devil’s Bible weighed 74.8 kilograms. Size added legibility and grandeur, but was also a way of preventing theft. In an 858 AD letter to Archbishop Hincmar, Lupus of Ferrières explained why he’d been reluctant to send a copy of Bede’s Collectanea: the book was too large to conceal on one’s person or to hide in a bag and, even if it could be, ‘one would have to fear an attack of robbers who would certainly be attracted by the beauty of the book’. Later, as the average size of books shrank, the rate of theft would rise, and librarians would have to resort to a portfolio of techniques to keep their books safe.
In the late Middle Ages, as the number of books grew, they began to be shelved standing up, alongside each other, on bookshelves. To accommodate this new arrangement, books had to be made to conform to verticality. We take it for granted today that books can slide in and out of shelves smoothly. In the transition to uprightness, though, changes had to be made. Bindings had to be strong enough to stop the text block from drooping in the binding, or dropping out of it altogether. Some changes were overt, even drastic. At the Spanish royal library of El Escorial, silver mounts and clasps were removed from the outer covers of books so that adjacent bindings would not be scratched; the recovered metal was sold to scrappers and goldsmiths.
Evolving incrementally from lecterns, bookshelves brought a host of thermodynamic and monosyllabic problems: sag, lean, fall, cram, hook, squash. Displaying a peculiar mathematical beauty, the rate of shelf-sag occurs proportionally to the shelf’s length, to the power of four. In light of such bookshelf calculus, the modern library reformer Melvil Dewey thought the optimal shelf length was one metre. Any longer and sagging was inevitable without costly reinforcement.
Samuel Pepys—a recognisably modern collector with his taste for English literature, science and maritime voyages—could not tolerate even the slightest deviation from straightness. Fastidious to the point of mania, he buttressed his shelves with elegant brass rods. Pepys had even less patience for the ragged line that occurs when books of different heights are shelved together. He commissioned tailor-made blocks—little wooden plinths disguised with leather—and placed them under his books so that the tops would be exactly even. Each block was rounded and gilded to match its burden.
Some collectors have been known to carry tape measures to bookshops, to be sure to buy volumes that are precisely the right size for the gap they are meant to fill. ‘Inchrule’ Brewer, for example, earned his nickname by carrying in his pocket a folding ruler, ‘with which he measured rare books and bought them by length and breadth’. The diplomat Pablo Manguel assembled a private library in Buenos Aires by instructing his secretary to purchase books ‘by the yard’ and to put them in green leather covers that matched precisely the uniform height of his bookshelves. To fit the books to this tight specification, the binders armed themselves with scissors and guillotines and invaded the top and bottom margins, even going so far as to obliterate the top lines of text.
(Manguel’s books were thoughtlessly chosen and thoughtlessly abridged, but the eclectic library was perfect for his son Alberto. With the cut-down books, young Alberto completed his sexual education by reading Lolita, Peyton Place, Main Street and, in the Espasa–Calper Spanish encyclopaedia, the harrowing entry on gonorrhoea.)
Tim Munby noticed the propensity of books to fill room after room with the inevitability of the rising tide. 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. The mediaeval shelves th
at are still in place in the library of Queen’s College, Cambridge, demonstrate neatly the gradual transformation of lecterns into shelves. Founded in 1448, the college’s original library of chained books featured bi-level, standing lecterns, with desks sliding out from underneath a single shelf. The ends of the lecterns were carved in an ornate, late Elizabethan or early Jacobean style. Around the year 1600, carpenters cut off the sloping tops of fourteen of the lecterns and replaced them with single shelves, retaining the decorative ends, which became the sides of the lower part of what were now bookshelves. At a later date, extra shelves were inserted in the mid-level. At a still later date, sometime before 1650, the final stage in the ascension was completed: the open bottoms of the old lecterns were filled with more shelves. As a result of this history, the surviving bookcases feature striking remnants of the original lectern desks.
At Queen’s and other English libraries of the same period, the rising shelves created something new in the history of book storage: little private spaces—libraries within libraries. Placing bookcases perpendicular to exterior walls, just as the original lecterns had been placed, is known as the ‘stall’ system. First used, it is believed, at Merton College in 1590, this system came to characterise early institutional libraries in England.
The opening of Leiden University’s library in 1594 was one of several catalysts for Thomas Bodley’s decision to revive at Oxford the library that had been dispersed and dismantled in the Reformation. On 23 February 1598, Bodley wrote to the vice-chancellor:
I will take the charge and cost vpon me, to reduce it again to his former vse: and to make it fitte, and handsome with seates, and shelfes, and Deskes, and all that may be needfull, to stirre vp other mens benevolence, to helpe to furnish it with bookes.
For the revived library, Bodley adopted the new stall system. The Bodleian formally opened on 8 November 1602. The shelves were well stocked with 299 manuscripts and over 1700 printed volumes. Just as Bodley had hoped, the library proved to be a book magnet; a mere three years later, when the first printed catalogue was published, there were about 6000 volumes. In European libraries, in contrast, bookcases were usually arranged parallel to and against the walls. This ‘wall’ system was first adopted on a large scale at the Escorial. The Wren Library, at Cambridge’s Trinity College, used a combination of the wall and stall systems.
Whether oriented in parallel or perpendicularly, the full-height bookcase is just one example of a bibliographical technology that was once novel but is now ubiquitous. Punctuation is another example. Separating words with blank space, and using punctuation marks and coloured inks and upper and lower case 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 organised 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 capitalised word that is exhausting for our modern eyes to read.
Today, the numbering of pages—called ‘pagination’—is ubiquitous. But this, too, was not always so. ‘Foliation’—numbering leaves rather than pages—predominated in the sixteenth century. Pagination only gained its ascendancy after 1600. Like the books that preceded printing, the first generation of printed books (those printed before 1475) hardly used any numbering at all.
Throughout history, different cultures have written and read in different directions on the page. Cuneiform was written and read left to right; Arabic right to left; Chinese top to bottom; and Ancient Greek, for a time, back and forth (‘boustrophedon’ or ‘ox-turning’), like ploughing a field. Some Etruscan texts were also written in the boustrophedon style. (Lemuel Gulliver documented the manner of writing among the Cascagians—bottom to top—and in the land of Lilliput—‘aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England’.)
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, different tastes and traditions also governed how books would stand on bookshelves. Decisions about whether to shelve books spine-inward or outward dictated whether titles would appear on spines or fore-edges (the outer extremities of the leaves). Famous early libraries that shelved their books spine-inward include Dublin’s Trinity College Library and Spain’s Escorial and Colombina libraries. At the Bodleian, chained folios were placed with their fore-edges facing outwards. Book spines and edges can be read to reveal much about how books were used and stored.
With strikingly photogenic effect, Odorico Pillone shelved his books spine-inward and commissioned the artist Cesare Vecillio to paint 172 of their fore-edges with colourful images relevant to the books’ contents. (A photograph of twelve of his painted fore-edges standing on a shelf is one of the most shared bibliophile images on the internet.) Vecillio was an excellent artist but a fallible bookman. Images on two of the volumes were painted upside down.
In the seventeenth century, an opulent fashion introduced a new twist to fore-edge decoration. Fore-edge paintings were concealed under layers of gold, so that each image would only become visible when the leaves were splayed like a fan. Samuel Mearne pioneered this secret art. He was royal bookbinder to Charles II from the Restoration to 1683. The fore-edge painting on Charles’s 1622 Book of Common Prayer is a beautiful example. The painting consists of five vertical pictures showing the agony, betrayal, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Christ. It was effected in watercolour, probably by a hired artist working on the fanned pages ‘with as dry a brush as possible’. When the paint dried, the finisher squared the pages, then coated them (using camel hair or a sponge) with a mixture of red chalk, black lead, water and muriatic acid, finally cutting the gold leaf to size and placing it on the surface. The technique is so effective that many book owners fail to notice the magical, disappearing paintings in their collections. Finding them is a supreme delight. Every book with a gilt fore-edge should be searched for buried treasure.
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 100,000,000 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. Leibniz remarked, ‘if the world goes on this way for a thousand years and as many books are written as today, I’m afraid whole cities will be made up of libraries.’ Noticing the explosion of printed titles, Thomas Coryat observed, ‘methinks we want rather readers for bookes than bookes for readers.’
(In his 1622 Problema Arithmeticum de Rerum Combinationibus, Pierre Guldin formally calculated the number of libraries that would be needed to accommodate all the books that could be written using terms from an alphabet of twenty-three letters. His research generated an answer of Borgesian precision: seventy thousand billion billion words, recorded in 1000-page volumes with 100 lines per page and sixty characters per line, would require exactly 8,052,122,350 libraries, each one measuring 132 metres per side.)
Apart from filling public libraries, books infiltrated households and formed themselves into private libraries. From the beginning of the first century BC, prosperous Roman households maintained libraries, along with staff who worked as readers and scribes. Books could be obtained as war booty, and through dealers in the Greek-founded southern Italian cities such as Syracuse and Naples. The great villa libraries, described by Pliny and Seneca, are examples of a fashionable way to display wealth and learning, almost certainly in that order.
The Renaissance saw a revival of private libraries. From the mid-fifteenth century, Italian citizens of means began to have small studies built into their homes. According to J
ohn Hale’s The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, these were places in which to store family papers, but they were also sanctuaries, ‘where the head of a busy household could retreat to read his favourite books, often at night when others were asleep’. The origins of the English private library date from no later than the sixteenth century. In the 1530s John Leland, venturing through the restive north of England, ‘rejoiced to find in the tower of a castle belonging to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, a study-room with desks and book-rests’. The earl called his book room ‘Paradise’.
Fools in love
Bibliophiles must endure all manner of insults. Critics have accused book-accumulators of being irrational, peculiar, life’s voyeurs, obsessed with inanimate lovers, the classic cold fish. The Irish-born diplomat Shane Leslie wrote, not very diplomatically, that the book-collector is the hermaphrodite of literature: neither a reader nor a writer. As soon as books were common enough to collect, bibliophiles were the subject of ridicule. Sebastian Brandt’s 1494 Ship of Fools is a rollcall of dunces, and the foremost dunce is the man who collects ‘useless books’ he cannot read.
A dialogue in Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae rails against the accumulation of unread books. The Latin poet and rhetorician Decimus Magnus Ausonius wrote similarly in one of his opuscules:
You’ve bought books and filled shelves, O Lover of the Muses.
Does that mean you’re a scholar now?
If you buy string instruments, plectrum and lyre today:
Do you think that by tomorrow the realm of music will be yours?
In 1607 Cardinal Federico Borromeo founded Milan’s Ambrosian Library. (It was inaugurated in 1609.) Borromeo’s own writings reveal an immense and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. Why do birds sing? How do angels and demons speak? Do angels have proper names? Why do some animals live longer than others? What do Icelanders eat? What do the people of Guinea believe? When and where was writing invented? Borromeo had little patience for the veneration of books as physical objects. When a bibliophile showed him a well-printed, well-preserved and handsomely bound Cicero, the cardinal replied, ‘I should like it more if it were a little less clean and a little more used.’