by Stuart Kells
Today, however, the picture of the Vatican Library as forbidding and inaccessible is largely a myth. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a succession of brilliant directors—Father Franz Ehrle (1895–1913; he became a cardinal), Monsignor Achille Ratti (1913–22, formerly librarian of the Ambrosian, and later Pope Pius XI), Monsignor Giovanni Mercati (1922–36, another future cardinal) and Monsignor Anselmo Albareda (1936–62, ditto)—transformed the library into one of the world’s most progressive and efficient libraries, notwithstanding those covered shoulders.
The antiquity of the library is another myth. For more than 1000 years after the fall of Rome, the papal collections grew, but the 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—a time when the church was much less centralised and papalised, and when other Catholic collections overshadowed the pope’s library. (The capitular library of St Peter’s, for example, possessed more early codices, thanks to a generous bequest from Cardinal Giordano Orsini.) 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.
Delicacies
The olfactory sense has a proud place in bibliographical research. Much can be discovered by smell, though some odours continue to confound scholars. A uniquely sweet and smoky scent, for example, adheres to some of T. E. Lawrence’s books. The precise source of the aroma is the subject of debate. Is it from fruity pipe tobacco? Motorcycle exhaust fumes? Tea and biscuits? Decaying leather? Ink, glue, mould, ashes, liquorice? Or camel?
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid studied a twentieth-century medical historian who could determine, by sniffing eighteenth-century papers in old archives, how far a cholera outbreak had travelled. The tell-tale smell of vinegar, a disinfectant, still adhered to the papers after the passage of two centuries. Books can also be dated by their smell. Volatile organic compounds in paper, leather and glue are known to degrade at predictable rates. As they do, they release a blended scent that carries notes of vanilla (from lignin and vanillin) and almonds (from benzaldehyde). Other implicated compounds include toluene, alcohol and ethyl hexanol, each of which can produce sweet and floral odours, and which can distinguish older from younger books. Eugene Field, author of The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, wrote lyrically on the subject: ‘Sweeter than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is the smell of those old books of mine.’
Born around 385 AD and dying in Bethlehem in 439, Melania the Younger collected an important early Christian library. She was so fond of reading that ‘she would go through the Lives of the Fathers as if she were eating dessert’. The attractiveness of books has led other people to go further. Holbrook Jackson devoted two sections of Anatomy of Bibliomania to the subject of eating books.
In mediaeval Jewish society, learning to read was celebrated and ritualised. On the Feast of Shavuot, as Alberto Manguel described in A History of Reading, a boy visits his teacher to undertake an initiation rite. The teacher shows the boy a slate containing scriptoral passages written in the Hebrew alphabet, and reads them aloud to him. The slate is then covered in honey, which the child licks. Other modes of bodily assimilation were also used. Teachers would write biblical verses on honey cakes, and on eggs that were hard-boiled and peeled. After proving himself by reading the verses out loud, the child was allowed to eat the cakes and eggs, thereby ingesting the words of God both literally and figuratively in a peculiar echo of the doctrine of transubstantiation.
CHAPTER 7
Secret Histories
Tricks and treasures in library design
Acquiring books is a fraught business. In June 1933 the Belfast bookseller James Weatherup wrote to the Rosenbachs, a famous firm of New York booksellers who had helped build America’s greatest private and institutional collections.
Dear Sirs,
Bay Psalm Book.
I have a copy of the above book particulars of which I have noted on the enclosed sheet. If you are interested I shall be glad to hear from you. In the meantime I shall hold it for your reply, and if you care to see the book, I shall be glad to forward it—per my daughter, who will be leaving this side for New York about 1st July—for inspection & offer.
The attachment described the book cryptically and matter-of-factly.
Old Brown morocco.—worn & cracked at hinges. Title-page—missing. Preface a few leaves missing…Leaves unpaginated, and number in this copy 135, in addition to an errata leaf entitled ‘Faults escaped in printing,’ and the 4 leaves of preface making in all 140 leaves. Four leaves, signature D, are entirely missing and do not seem to ever have been in this copy.
Dr Abraham Rosenbach replied by cable that Miss Weatherup should indeed bring the book to America. When the volume arrived at 15 East 51st Street, Rosenbach examined it carefully and confirmed what he had only dared to hope. It was a hitherto unknown copy of the first book printed in North America. An extremely exciting and exceptionally valuable book, despite its many faults. (In addition to the missing title leaf, for example, the copy lacked seven other leaves.) As to rarity, no copy had appeared since 1855—and a total of only eleven, from an original print run of about 1700 copies, were known to exist worldwide. As to value, the even worse Van Sinderen copy, which lacked nineteen leaves, would be estimated only a few years later at $50,000.
Rosenbach adopted a shrewd strategy. He sent another cable to Weatherup. ‘Book received regret condition we do not make offers so kindly cable your price in pounds.’ Weatherup’s reply, ‘£150’, opened the way to a quick sale, one of the greatest bargains ever savoured by a book-dealer. The purchase, though, would be bookended by a very different Rosenbach acquisition of a very similar volume.
In March 1879, at the auction of George Brinley’s estate, Cornelius Vanderbilt had purchased a complete copy (containing all 148 leaves) of the Bay Psalm Book. At that time, the book cost $1200. On Cornelius’s death the book passed to Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, then to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and finally, by bequest, to her Trust. After World War II, the trustees decided to sell the book for the benefit of the North Country Community Hospital in Glen Cove, New York. Gertrude’s son Cornelius, known as ‘Sonny’, was determined to keep the book in Vanderbilt ownership.
On 28 January 1947, for the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Trust, the auction house Parke-Bernet held a single-lot sale of the book. Bound by Francis Bedford in dark-brown morocco with elaborate gold decoration, it was in excellent shape, notwithstanding the restoration of the fore-edges of two gatherings (patches of lost text had been inked in). With Henry C. Taylor, chairman of the Yale Library Associates, Rosenbach sought pledges and contributions to buy the book for Yale University. John Fleming, acting for Rosenbach, arrived at Parke-Bernet with pledges—totalling $95,000—plus an understanding, never clearly or formally articulated, that ‘if more was needed, more would be forthcoming’.
Thanks in large part to aggressive bidding by Sonny Vanderbilt Whitney, the price rose quickly from the start. The auction soon settled into a pattern in which Fleming would raise the leading bid by $1000 and Vanderbilt Whitney would up it by $4000. This continued until a Fleming bid took the price to $151,000. Sonny was out and the hammer dropped in Fleming and Rosenbach’s favour, making the volume at that time the most expensive book ever sold at auction, and taking the price to a level fifty per cent higher than the world record amount paid by Henry Folger in 1919 for the Shakespeare ‘False Folio’. The transfer of wealth from Yale’s donors to the Vanderbilt Whitney Trust caused jaws to drop. In 1640 the Bay Psalm Book had sold for twenty pence; now, the auction price placed it in the same rank as the world’s most sought-after printed books—such as Gutenberg’s celebrated forty-two-line Bible and Audubon’s
sumptuous Birds of America.
Fleming’s apparent triumph, though, quickly soured. Shocked by the price, several pledgers backed out. An outraged Mrs Harkness, for example, withdrew her $30,000 contribution. The university, too, refused to condone a bid that was more than $50,000 higher than the total endowment. As a stop-gap measure, a panicked Rosenbach waived his commission and wrote Yale a cheque for $49,500 on the expectation that the university would seek further philanthropic funds and that, as those funds arrived, his own contribution would be repaid. Yale’s president and fellows, though, sent him a warm letter of gratitude for the amount they saw as a helpful and timely gift.
Agonised negotiations went nowhere. A full five years after the sale, Rosenbach’s brother and partner Philip was still ‘hectoring’ Yale for the money. The university’s lawyer Edwin L. Weisel, of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, advised him to suck it up. ‘All of us have many disappointments in life in a business way and there is no sense to tearing one’s self up emotionally over such disappointments.’ The Rosenbachs’ own lawyer, Morris Wolf, also recommended dropping the matter. ‘I feel it would be both useless and undignified to try to pin any legal or moral obligation on Yale.’ Snookered, Rosenbach thus unwittingly became ‘the most generous of the friends responsible for donating the volume’ that is now a cornerstone of the university’s collections.
Rosenbach’s unintentional contribution neatly offset the enormous paper profit he’d made at the expense of the Weatherups. In 1954 the Weatherup–Rosenbach copy became part of the founding gift—this time a voluntary one—for the Rosenbach Museum and Library. On 26 November 2013, at Sotheby’s New York, another one of the eleven Bay Psalm Books came up for sale. It set a new world auction record for a printed book, realising $14,165,000. Businessman and philanthropist David Rubenstein, the successful bidder, expressed plans to share the book with the American public ‘by loaning it to libraries across the country, before putting it on long-term loan at one of them’.
Samuel Pepys housed his books in gilded cases so exactingly that his footman, after consulting the catalogue, could locate any book blindfolded. (Pepys’s books and cases are now at Magdalene College, Cambridge.) The young Marquis de Sade performed the same trick: he knew so well the aristocratic and hedonistic library of his libertine uncle the Abbé de Sade that, by the age of ten, he could locate almost any volume with his eyes closed. (Years later, while imprisoned in the Bastille, de Sade produced a manuscript, 120 Days of Sodom, whose format harked back to papyrus scrolls. Jack Kerouac also produced a scroll manuscript for his novel On the Road.)
For the young marquis, this mode of book-finding was the first of many aberrant behaviours. 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 to Marshall 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.
According to an eighteenth-century principle of library design, a viewer anywhere in the library ought to have a direct line of sight to every book. That way, the grandeur of the collection could be displayed at one view. The greatest libraries of that century were designed to delight the senses—especially the visual sense. The Silver Library of Königsberg, the rococo library at Melk and Austria’s Admont library—whose books were rebound in white leather to match the interior colour-scheme—are spectacular examples; the book world’s answers to the Amber Room at St Petersburg and the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
Seeing requires light. That necessity, along with fear of fire, dominated the design and management of early libraries. With candles forbidden and electricity not yet harnessed, the only solution was natural light. Mediaeval buildings purpose-built to house books can be identified today by their narrow, regularly spaced, south-facing windows, which alternated between lecterns and, later, bookcases.
The windows were narrow for a reason. Light has a disintegrating effect on leather, as can readily be seen when books have stood for any appreciable length of time in direct sunlight. At Oxford and Cambridge and the British Museum, Douglas Cockerell noticed that the leather on the backs of books closest to the light was ‘absolutely rotten, crumbling to dust at the slightest friction’, while the leather on books away from the light was comparatively sound. There are few sorrier sights than a collection of leather bindings whose life has been sucked from them. Surprisingly, Cockerell found that the light affected the vellum bindings worst of all.
After many experiments, the management of light in libraries has been elevated to a sublime science. Armed with hard-won knowledge, library builders have used tinted glass to blunt the sun’s impact. Blue and violet glasses are just as bad as untinted glass, it turns out, whereas red, green and yellow glasses are highly protective of leather bindings. Cockerell recommended pale yellow or olive-green glass in library windows exposed to direct sunlight. He especially favoured the ‘Cathedral’ glasses manufactured by Pilkington & Co. Of these, inventory numbers 712 and 812 afforded books almost complete protection during two months’ exposure—and they bathed libraries in divine light.
The Sperry & Hutchinson Company of New York City began in 1896 with a simple yet lucrative idea: a type of coupon known as the trading stamp. Merchants bought the postage-sized stamps, then gave them out with customers’ purchases. After accumulating enough stamps, the customers exchanged them at redemption centres for fancy products. Sperry & Hutchinson’s stamps became one of the most recognisable symbols of post-war consumer culture. The company was widely known for its prominent advertisements in the Ladies’ Home Journal, the Saturday Evening Post and Munsey’s Magazine.
The Sperry patriarch, Thomas Sperry, died at the age of forty-nine from accidental ptomaine poisoning while on a European trip. Born in 1886, 1887 and 1888 respectively, three brothers—Edwin, Frederick and Walter Beinecke—turned the company into a Fortune 500 business. (Two of the brothers married two Sperry daughters.) The brothers earned personal fortunes and put them to good use. Edwin built one of the largest collections of books and manuscripts relating to Robert Louis Stevenson. He also assembled a fine collection of German glass and stoneware. Frederick (‘Fritz’) was an outstanding collector of original source material relating to the American West. His other interests were broad: model trains, model ships, horology, photography, yachting, fishing. Walter was the sporty brother, a champion gymnast who also played water polo, golf, bridge and backgammon. Ranked among the best contract bridge players in the world, he helped write the original rules for the game, as well as those for American backgammon.
All three Beinecke brothers were Yale University alumni. The Yale English professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker was a passionate advocate of book-collecting and preservation. He mentored leading collectors such as Paul Mellon, Frank Altschul, Wilmarth Lewis—and the Beinecke brothers. Tinker’s mentorees initiated the Yale Library Associates and came to be known as the ‘sons of Tink’. Edwin and Fritz both served turns as chairman of the group, and were among the astute Associates who welcomed Abraham Rosenbach’s ‘donation’ towards the purchase of the Bay Psalm Book.
In the middle of the twentieth century, the three brothers funded a major new library for Yale. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, on Hewitt Quadrangle, was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The most striking feature of the library is its use of light.
Construction was completed in 1963. The library’s core is a six-storey, glass-encased tower of book stacks—a temple to the book, made from books. The airtight tower is surrounded by a void and a Platonically proportioned, box-shaped outer shell (the width and length are twice and three times the height respectively). The shell was made from Vermont marble panels, three centimetres thick, and Vermont Woodbury granite frames. The alabaster dom
e of a palace in Istanbul inspired Bunshaft’s use of translucent marble. (The box and frame design also resembles sheets of Sperry & Hutchinson coupons.) Looked at in daylight from outside, the shell seems opaque, but that is just a trick. On sunny days, honey-coloured light warms the interior. At night, the shell glows amber.
The central tower has room for 180,000 volumes. A further 600,000 volumes can be housed in the underground stacks. The storage areas are air-conditioned to maintain constant temperature and humidity. Thanks to the thoughtful and innovative design, sufficient light filters into the interior without damaging the holdings, which now include Fritz’s Western Americana collection, Edwin’s Robert Louis Stevenson library, and the Vanderbilt–Rosenbach copy of the Bay Psalm Book. Edwin’s glass collection went to the Corning Museum in New York.
St Gall’s rococo library has more than one secret. Extending along either side of the main hall are hinged wooden pillars that, when opened, reveal an ingenious eighteenth-century cataloguing system. The system uses cards and pins to track the movement of books. Also at St Gall is a hidden staircase that leads to a separate room dedicated to storing the library’s rarest manuscripts.
Wiblingen Abbey also has hidden staircases and hidden doorways; in an especially theatrical touch there, niches with statues disguise the doors that lead to the elevated gallery. The baroque library hall of the Biblioteca Angelica was designed by Borromini and remodelled by Luigi Vanvitelli. Each of the hall’s four corners features a bust of an eminent personage such as the controversial cardinal and Vatican librarian Henry Noris. The plinths beneath the busts conceal secret doors that open to closets and to spiral staircases leading to the double gallery above.