by Stuart Kells
The Biblioteca Joanina in Coimbra, Portugal, features disappearing ladders. When not in use, they slide into pockets between its bookcases. The great library at Melk Abbey in Austria has little studies hidden behind the shelves. In the main hall, the lower parts of the middle cases in each bay are hinged and set on rollers. When opened, they reveal secret study carrels with private windows. These spaces were probably copied from similar ones at the fortress-like Hofbibliothek in Vienna. Architecture historians James Campbell and Will Pryce remarked of the hidden spaces in the Hofbibliothek: ‘When the doors of these “secret rooms” are opened, they provide a glimpse behind the stage set.’ These secret features are part of an enchanting conceit in library design. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, architects brought to library design the same playful spirit that animates the best fore-edge paintings.
The designers of the Hofbibliothek and the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome played games with perspective and the perception of height. The library at Melk Abbey is another example. Fixed in position, the shelves there are placed to enhance the sensation of scale. The higher shelves are set closer together, and the very top shelf is so impossibly shallow that real books will not fit. For that shelf, the designers resorted to fake books: little book-shaped blocks made from wood and labelled with playfully literal titles such as Wood by Anonymous and Empty by Woody.
In interior designer Axel Vervoordt’s castle near Antwerp, a secret door lined with sliced-off book-spines leads to a deluxe, marble-clad bathroom. Doors inside Austria’s Admont Library conceal hidden staircases in the same playful way. The doors are covered with real spines that bear fake titles. Some of the faux volumes are easy to spot: they are impossibly squat, made by a craftsman who thought book spines were like toffee that could be cut to any length. At Chatsworth House in England, the Sixth Duke of Devonshire commissioned a similar door with a similar purpose: to cover the entrance to a secret stairway. Thomas Hood, a humorist and playwright, contributed bogus titles for the fake books, such as The Scottish Boccaccio by D. Cameron, Reflections on Suet by Lamb, On Death’s Door by John Knox, and Shelley’s Conchologist.
In Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley imagined a country house whose library featured a door ‘ingeniously upholstered’ with genuine-looking rows of dummy books that had such Borgesian titles as Biography of Men who were Born Great, Biography of Men who Achieved Greatness, Biography of Men who had Greatness thrust upon Them, Biography of Men who were Never Great at All, Tales of Knockespotch and Wild Goose Chase, a Novel, in six volumes. Beyond the door: a pile of letter-files, old newspapers, and the mummy-case of an Egyptian lady, acquired by ‘the second Sir Ferdinando’ on the Grand Tour.
(Alberto Manguel tells the following story about imaginary titles. The French author Paul Masson noticed that the Bibliothèque Nationale was deficient in Latin and Italian books of the fifteenth century. He decided to remedy this by compiling a list of books that would save the prestige of the catalogue. Masson made up all the titles on the list. His friend Colette asked what was the use of books that did not exist. Masson answered indignantly, ‘Well, I can’t be expected to think of everything!’)
The British Museum’s domed reading room also has secret doors. To maintain the impression of an unbroken series of books around the walls, the dome’s pillars and access doors are painted with false book-backs. In the 2001 Japanese anime film Read or Die, the reading room is the secret entrance to the underground headquarters of the British Library’s ‘Special Operations Division’—daiei-toshokan tokushu-kousakubu—agents with special powers to fight book-related crime and terrorism, and to acquire rare works for the library. (In Robert Littell’s book The Once and Future Spy, a villain attempts to assassinate a CIA analyst at the Beinecke Library.)
Secret doors at the Biblioteca Angelica are painted with books, but the secret is an open one: the doors are easy to find because the painted books are more vertical and more uniform in height and width than the neighbouring real ones. Schussenried Abbey solves the problem of untidy and uneven volumes (and the problem of damage from light) by storing its books in cabinets whose doors are painted with idealised volumes. At the Central Branch of Kansas City Library, the fake books are on the outside. A signboard facade of twenty-two faux spines, with titles such as Charlotte’s Web, The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22 and Fahrenheit 451, stands more than six metres tall, and has been used to beautify and bookify the exterior of the library’s multi-storey carpark.
Other libraries bulked out their collections with grand-looking volumes that were blank or even empty inside. Maurice Hewlett experienced an intense disappointment when he took from a shelf a volume, ‘as big and hefty as Liddell and Scott’, only to find nothing inside it but air—and a wire clip for holding papers. Book-boxes have also been used as ‘camouflage’ for chess boards. In the nineteenth-century botanical library at Warsenstein, near Kassel in Germany, there were book-boxes made from wood. To make such boxes from real books, men scour auction rooms, bookshops and bookstalls for cheap but early bindings, then turn them into receptacles, for ‘cigarettes, cigars, liqueurs, jewels, chocolates, bon-bons, or note paper’. Holbrook Jackson called these men ghouls; and those who encouraged them were no better than body-snatchers.
Another field of fakers make cheap leather bindings look more expensive. Cheap sheepskin, for example, can be treated to add grain and resemble goatskin. And smooth spines can be given a spurious air of quality, seriousness and antiquity by adding fake raised bands. These ornaments have a long and strange history. On mediaeval codices, raised bands were a necessity: they revealed the heavier cords that were used to hold gatherings together in a strong text block. In the eighteenth century, though, innovations in binding (such as sewing gatherings on recessed supports) made raised bands unnecessary. And yet, on countless thousands of books, binders in England, France, Italy and Crete continued to add raised bands, often by inserting unnecessary lengths of cord.
Some of the earliest examples of false raised bands are from Germany. In 1442 they were used on a binding made by the Carthusians of Buxheim. Other examples from the second half of the fifteenth century include a 1457 binding on a manuscript in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel; a Strasburg edition, printed not later than 1473, with six false half-bands under alum-tawed pigskin, also in the Herzog August Bibliothek; and a 1497 south German pigskin binding on an Aldus edition in the University of Kentucky.
Some binders added bands to please their clients; others did so to deceive them, supplying a cheaper binding at anything but a cheap price. Esteemed binders felt it necessary to assert that they did not stoop to false bands. The bill for Roger Payne’s binding of The Vale Royall of Chester states that the binding was ‘Sew’d in the very best Manner on six bands on the outside (the Bands are not saw’d in and there is not any false bands)’. The art of the fake band extended well into the twentieth century. A 1986 advertisement for the ersatz Franklin Library played on the longstanding belief that ‘real’ books should have raised bands. In the advertisement, the senior consulting editor from Doubleday tenderly strokes the spine of a book, ribbed for pleasure, and sighs, ‘The raised spine is a giveaway. That’s quality binding.’
In the libraries and scriptoria of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Dwarves write in invisible inks. Their ‘moon-letters’ are runes that can only be seen when the moon shines behind them. For some special moon-letters, the moon has to be of the same shape and season as the one shining on the day they were written. The runes on Thrór’s Map, read at Rivendell by the Elf lord Elrond, can only be seen with a midsummer’s eve’s crescent moon shining through. Made by Thrór—the Dwarf king and grandfather of Thorin Oakenshield—the parchment map is a plan of Lonely Mountain. The ink formulas used to write moon-letters are mysterious, but a hint comes from ancient Byzantium. There, in 250 BC, Philon brewed an invisible ink using colourless tannic acid. To make his ink visible, a chemical reaction was initiated by over-painting with iron salts.
Books can hide in libraries as effectively as the moon-letters hid on Thror’s Map. Errant volumes fall down behind and between shelves; they hide in archival boxes and distant stacks; and they hide in plain sight. As Lucien Polastron remarked, ‘the book hides in the library as surely as the tree hides in the heart of the forest’. The history of libraries is full of in-house stories of amazing, heartening and embarrassing discoveries. Found in the Bodleian: a mislaid early pamphlet, rediscovered between shelves. Found in the National Library of Scotland: the lost magnum opus of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Found in the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne: overlooked mineralogy studies whose rediscovery launched New Guinea’s mining industry. At Lismore Castle: the Book of Lismore, an Irish manuscript, found hidden in a wall. At Germany’s Württemberg State Library: a seventeenth-century portrait of Vlad Dracul, a.k.a. Dracula. And found in the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1984: an exceptionally important early English manuscript that had been used as binder’s waste inside the covers of two sixteenth-century volumes on the subject of plague. Libraries, though curated, are quintessentially places of serendipity.
The manuscript discovered in the Folger is a double-page Latin excerpt from a translation of the Ecclesiastical History of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine. Up to 200 years older than the Book of Kells (and almost 1000 years older than most of the other books in the Folger collections), it is the earliest extant manuscript that originated in England. It was probably made by an Irish monk in an English monastery in the first half of the seventh century. Frank Mowery, the Folger’s head conservator, noticed it while rebinding the two plague volumes. Professor Bernhard Bischoff later identified it as one of only two known Latin manuscripts in Irish half-uncial. Christopher de Hamel of Sotheby’s described the manuscript as ‘probably the earliest known piece of English writing of any kind’. Sotheby’s estimated the excerpt at up to $100,000 but the rare-book dealer Hans P. Kraus told the New York Times that he found Sotheby’s estimate excessive. ‘It’s a little piece of vellum,’ he said. ‘A very tiny piece. It is old—very old. It is absolutely not very beautiful.’ Kraus valued it at about one-fifth of Sotheby’s estimate, but he was wrong. When Sotheby’s London sold it for the Folger Library in 1985, the tattered, yellowed, crumpled remains brought US$105,600.
The Morgan Library holds a similar fragmentary treasure: a single sacramentary leaf, retrieved from inside a binding where it, too, had been used as waste. The original manuscript, featuring a large coloured interlace initial and other geometric and interlace ornament, was probably written and illuminated at Chur in Switzerland, sometime in the second half of the eighth century. By the ninth century, the manuscript had been moved to St Gall, whose monks added Latin text on the reverse side.
Books can hide in uncatalogued libraries as easily as binder’s waste hides in spines. In his 2007 book, Books on Fire, Polastron wrote that 2 million of the works in Argentina’s National Library had never even been catalogued, and nor had they been insured. The extent of losses from fires and theft could never be known.
At the Vatican Library, whose catalogue was only recently completed, scholars and librarians are always finding things. In 1926 an important missing letter was rediscovered—under a chair. The letter, to Clement VII, was signed in 1530 by the Archbishop of Canterbury along with five other bishops and twenty-two abbots. The authors complained of the pope’s ‘excessive delay’ in annulling Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Perhaps the most remarkable discovery in the papal stacks was a smallish Greek manuscript written in or around 550 AD by the Byzantine historian Procopius. In the New Yorker Daniel Mendelsohn described the discovery in gripping terms. Though the manuscript was largely unknown for 1000 years, there had been hints about its existence. A tantalising entry in the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia, mentioned the manuscript and its incendiary contents, but no one knew for sure where the complete text was, or even if it had survived at all. Then, in 1623, an archivist working in the Vatican Library came upon a fourteenth-century copy of Procopius’s text.
The archivist was Nicolò Alamanni and the manuscript he found bore an innocuous sounding Greek title, Anekdota. The modern catalogue entry is even more innocuous: ‘VAT. GR. 1001’. ‘VAT. GR.’ stands for Vaticanus Graecus. The work is more commonly known by its Latin title, Historia Arcana, ‘The Secret History’. In two other works, Procopius had chronicled approvingly the achievements of Emperor Justinian, ‘the last great Roman emperor and a model of European kingship’. The Secret History, though, told a very different story—the Justinian back story. With striking freshness and candour, Anekdota portrayed Justinian and his circle as ‘venal, corrupt, immoral and un-Christian’. Alamanni prepared a printed edition of the text, though he omitted the shocking titbits about Justinian’s wife, Theodora—the empress who famously complained that ‘Nature had granted to womankind only three orifices by which to be satisfied’. The margins of the Vatican manuscript still feature the inked comments and queries that Nicolò Alamanni himself made while preparing the printed edition. When the edition appeared in 1623, some readers were sure it was a hoax.
In Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel Sempere hides a volume in a great library—the cemetery of lost books, itself hidden in the heart of old Barcelona—by shelving the book between Juan Valera novels and a yearbook of Gerona’s judicial minutiae. Gerald Murnane’s The Plains—a novel as resistant as a tjurunga line to simple description—takes the sport of intra-library book-hiding several steps further. The Plains is mostly set in the library of a grand frontier home owned by a wealthy plainsman. A young man, about whom very little is known, embarks on several literary projects there, under the patronage of the owner. Perhaps the young man will produce a catalogue of the library, perhaps a history of this district of the plains. The plainsman’s wife also visits the library, and the young man engages in a curious, non-verbal, partly imagined conversation with her. Determined to break the silence between them in the ideal way, he makes elaborate plans. He will write a short work, perhaps a collection of essays, to be published privately, under an obscure imprint. Then he will place it in the library where the woman might find it. Or, better still, she ought not to read it, but learn only enough to distinguish him. ‘In short, she should not read a word of mine, although she should know that I had written something she might have read.’ The solution is to write the book, have it published and release only a handful of copies to reviewers, not for circulation, and to place a copy in the library. As soon as the book is catalogued and shelved the young man will remove it. This scheme, though, is also unsatisfactory: in the future, someone might still work out the copy’s existence, ‘and that the woman it was meant for had at least glanced at it’. After plotting to include the book in the ‘list of notable books never acquired by this library but held in other private collections in great houses of the plains’, and to add to the list a statement that a copy of the book was housed in an imaginary library in a non-existent district, he finally settles on the perfect strategy, ‘to write no book’ and to broadcast no suggestion that he had done so or ever intended to do so.
Libraries can hide things other than books. Some conceal their true make-up and their true age. The builders of baroque and rococo libraries made plaster and timber look like marble. Nineteenth-century libraries made steel look like stone. Other libraries use deceit and artifice, such as real mirrors and fake windows (an example of these is at the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome), to make the number of books seem larger, or the absence of books less striking.
Looking back on the great mediaeval tradition of scriptoria and illumination, some modern monks felt pressure to include a library room in their monastic complexes: how else could they prove they were fulfilling their expected duties? The masters of Metten Abbey in Bavaria built a small, single-storey library but decorated it ‘as lavishly as possible’, to distract attention from the meagre contents. This ‘incredi
bly ornate’ library features a vaulted roof supported by what James Campbell called, unsympathetically, ‘contorted allegorical figures’.
Rather than resort to a small library room, the abbot and architect at Altenburg built an enormous new wing featuring a triple-domed great hall 9.5m wide, 47.5m long and 15m high whose sides in large part cannot be seen from the entranceway.
As there are huge cases in the barrel-vaulted spaces between the domes, the viewer assumes that all the walls are lined with books. In fact, apart from one on the end wall, these are the only cases in the room. The walls of the domed spaces are filled with windows, but once under the domes, visitors are naturally drawn to look upwards to admire Troger’s magnificent paintings. The result is a huge library that actually has shelf space for very few books, which is exactly what the monks intended.
The trick is not entirely convincing; the room looks more like a ballroom than a library. The hall’s under-storey is a vast crypt, for the interment of provosts. ‘The words of the dead were thus kept above the bodies of the dead.’
Found
Apart from flowers, leaves, butterflies, dandruff, dental floss, panty liners, toilet paper, parking tickets, banana skins, lipsticks, stamps and cash, librarians regularly find bacon, fried eggs and pancakes inside books—all the ingredients for a flattened and desiccated breakfast. At a major public library in Salt Lake City, Josh Hanagarne recently found a large pair of white underpants wrapped around a copy of The Dangerous Book For Boys; and, in a copy of Guns, Germs and Steel, an unused condom. In 1953 a batch of eighteenth-century animal-membrane condoms, each one tied at the open end with silk ribbons, was found inside the British Museum copy of Grose’s 1783 A Guide to Health, Beauty, Riches, and Honour. The old condoms were transferred to the museum’s ‘Secretum’ collection of erotica. No one except Josh Hanagarne knows where the new one went.