The Library

by Stuart Kells

  Many species of animal and fungus are inimical to books. The very first libraries had problems with worms: in ancient Mesopotamia, before clay tablets were hardened in the sun or in a kiln, earthworms could bore into them, constructing tunnels in the soft clay. After the tablets hardened, worms could still munch and perturb the surface, confusing the cuneiform markings.

  Over millennia, the animal kingdom of book botherers has included termites, mud wasps, snakes, skunks, foxes, cockroaches and silverfish. Children and house-pets have done unspeakable things to private libraries. Rats and mice are known to gnaw the backs of books to reach the glue inside. Rodents also nibble vellum bindings, and the pages of vellum books that have become greasy with handling. When the Jesuit Order in Belgium was dissolved in 1773, the books from the Jesuit church in Brussels were to be transferred to the city’s royal library. The library had no room for the new accessions, so they were left temporarily in the Jesuit church, which was infested with mice. After much debate, the secretary of the Literary Society adopted a novel solution. Books that were considered useful, principally scientific and historical volumes, were placed on shelves in the middle of the nave, while the remainder were left on the floor. In this way, it was hoped, the outer books would be sacrificed to save the inner ones.

  Bookworms have been a scourge in libraries since ancient times. Aristotle wrote of them in his History of Animals. The poet and grammarian Evenus of Paros penned an epigram on the ‘black-fleshed’ bookworm, calling the creature, ‘Pest of the muses, devourer of pages’. Evenus lamented, ‘Wert thou born for the evil thou workest? Wherefore thine own foul form shapest thou, with envious toil?’

  In the thirteenth century, the manuscript Remedium Contra Vermes Librorum was widely circulated. In the seventeenth century, Christianus Mentzelius was claimed to have heard the bookworm ‘crow like a cock unto his mate’. Robert Hooke provided in Micrographia (1665) one of the first scientific descriptions of the creature:

  a small, white, silver shining worm or moth which I found much conversant among books and papers, and is supposed to be that which corrodes and eats holes thro’ the leaves and covers. Its head appears big and blunt and its body tapers from it toward the tail smaller and smaller, being shaped almost like a carrot.

  Typically, true ‘bookworms’ are insects from the order Coleoptera, which are sheath-winged beetles. (The most ravenous of these has a frightening name: Sitodrepa panicea.) Precisely identifying book-destroying culprits is difficult. Beetles account for one fifth of all living species, so the line-up of suspects is wide.

  Beetles live through four stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult. Most damage to books is done at the larval stage, which can extend for years. In one famous infestation, a single insect chomped a straight hole through twenty-seven contiguous volumes. Some species specialise in eating vellum, others paper, hemp, glue or flax. (Certain types of beetle are capable of eating through plastic and even through lead cable.) In his 1898 Facts about Bookworms, John Francis Xavier O’Conor described Dermestes lardarius, the larva of the larder beetle, as being ‘covered with bristles…like a tiny hedgehog, curling himself in his spikes to insure protection’.

  Bookworms flourish in circumstances of quiet neglect; larvæ have been known to ‘rear up’ when disturbed. The signs of active infestation are dead beetles and ‘frass’ (larval debris). Though the beetles typically emerge from exit holes to mate, some mating does take place inside books. The prohibition of eating and drinking in libraries is less about protecting books from spillages or sticky fingers than it is about discouraging insects and rodents.

  The notorious British Museum flea thrived in the poorly ventilated old reading room. In 1848 a reader remarked that the ‘flea generated in the room…is larger than any to be found elsewhere, except in the receiving rooms of work-houses’.

  In sixteenth-century China, libraries controlled infestations with herbal treatments. In the Tianyi Chamber, for example, bags of insect-repelling herbs were positioned in the book-cupboards. An early Chinese law required that huangneih, an extract from the seeds of the cork tree, be added as an ingredient in paper as a means to ward off insects. Chinese library-builders also spread gypsum beneath cupboards and shelves, to combat damp.

  Termites were a problem in tenth-century Baghdad. There, in 993 AD, Sabur ibn Ardashir’s librarians used chemicals to control the pests. Early insecticides and repellents included alum, cypress wood, clay daubing, clove oil, cedar oil, eucalyptus oil, musk and red myrrh. A mixture of boracic acid and methylated spirits was said to work well as a protection for books in tropical Australia and New Guinea. According to Jules Cousin, bookworms can be controlled with essence of turpentine, camphor, tobacco and fine pepper. The patented Keating’s Insect Powder is an alternative to pepper, as is snap freezing the infested books. An incursion of Italian bookworms at Yale’s Beinecke Library was controlled by freezing the pestilential books at minus thirty-six degrees Celsius for three days.

  Portuguese libraries have long relied on biological controls. The eighteenth-century libraries of Coimbra and Mafra host colonies of tiny bats. In summer the bats roost outside; in winter they roost behind the bookcases. Each night they earn their keep by feeding on bookworms and other bibliopests. Each morning the librarians earn their keep by sweeping up droppings. The micro bats might be helpful in Portugal, but larger bats, along with pigeons and damp, did much damage to the manuscripts at Durham Cathedral when it fell into neglect during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Borroloola is a small settlement on the remote McArthur River in Australia’s tropical gulf country. In the 1890s it gained a disreputable status as a frontier town, a centre for murderers and alcoholics. By the 1930s it was all but abandoned. And yet it once possessed one of the best libraries in rural Australia.

  Late in the nineteenth century, the chief of the Borroloola police—an Irishman with the heroic name Cornelius Power—decided to establish a library for the town. He ordered books from Mudie’s Select Library in London, and these formed the nucleus of the collection that was given an equally grand name: the McArthur River Institute. From those origins, the library grew rapidly, though its sources of funding and books after Power’s founding purchase are unclear. The Governor of Victoria; the Government of Australia; the National Library of Australia; the Carnegie Foundation; the Carnegie Corporation; the Carnegie Trust—each of these institutions has been put forward as a possible source of the more than 3000 volumes that the institute had accumulated by 1920.

  Rumour and myth surround the library just as Murnane’s great plains library was enveloped in mysterious plans and projects. The institute attracted overlanders, stockmen, bandits and hermits, all of whom used the library for education—and redemption. The drover Charles Joseph Scrutton claimed to have read the whole of the library three times. Roger Jose was said to have walked to Borroloola from Cunnamulla in Queensland. He lived in a shed in the centre of town—until the shed was nearly flattened by a cyclone. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported:

  He then rolled a damaged 1000-gallon tank from the hotel to the site on top of the hill opposite the present clinic and, with his Aboriginal companion, lived in it until his death in 1963. He was an eccentric who took full advantage of the Borroloola library and reputedly knew vast sections of Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin. He also had a good working knowledge of Shakespeare.

  Tourists in the area described ‘stumbling into bush camps at night to find bushmen reciting from the Greek classics, or argumentative swaggies referring to their borrowed copies of Hansard to settle political debates’. The Institute library no longer exists. The tropical estuarine environment in which it grew was not unlike Alexandria’s river delta, and it had the same destructive impact on the books. The volumes that were not stolen were destroyed by damp and mould, and especially by silverfish, cockroaches and—just like in ancient Baghdad—termites. In the mythology of northern Australia, though, the library grows larger day by day.

  CHAPTER
11

  The Count

  Book looters and thieves

  At Ashburnham Place in Sussex, the Fourth Earl of Ashburnham assembled in the nineteenth century a library that rivalled those of Richard Heber and Lord Spencer. Apart from a superb collection of early printed books—including two Gutenberg Bibles—it contained a fine selection of early manuscripts, of which the earl was a passionate collector. A superbious man—people referred to him as the old Bengal tiger at Ashburnham—he made it very difficult for scholars to access his collection. He was even less cooperative with people who wanted to buy his books. When the earl purchased an important collection of Irish manuscripts, Dr James Henthorn Todd, librarian at Dublin’s Trinity College, wrote asking if he could purchase them. The reply was icy. ‘If,’ Ashburnham wrote, ‘you will send me one of the finest manuscripts now in your possession—for instance the Book of Kells—I will tell you whether I will or will not give my Irish manuscripts for it.’ Todd replied resolutely that the Book of Kells was not his property—it was part of the Library of Archbishop Ussher, which Charles II presented to the University of Dublin at his Restoration. The heads of the university could not dispose of it without an Act of Parliament, and they would never do so anyhow, but thank you anyway.

  According to F. S. Ellis, Ashburnham was ‘a man rather calculated to inspire fear than love or respect’. To the nineteenth-century social trends that were making England’s lords more affable and egalitarian, Ashburnham was ‘wholly impervious’. An oft-repeated anecdote from his estate concerned the woodcutter who, after accidentally toppling the wrong tree, fell on his knees to beg the earl’s forgiveness. Ashburnham was disliked even by his own son, who would become the fifth earl, and who felt he’d gone without to fuel his father’s bibliomania.

  Guglielmo Bruto Icilio Timoleone, Conte Libri-Carucci dalla Sommaia, was born in Florence in 1803. A member of a venerable Tuscan family, he studied law and mathematics at the University of Pisa and displayed precocious brilliance in the natural sciences. After obtaining his doctorate, he published a paper on number theory that attracted the attention of the English inventor and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. Upon Guglielmo’s graduation, he was offered the chair of mathematical physics at the university—the first of many high offices and honours that would include membership of the Institut de France, a science professorship at the University of Paris, the Legion of Honour and, in 1841, appointment to the commission overseeing a France-wide audit of every manuscript, in every language, held in every departmental public library.

  Guglielmo’s passion for books manifested itself early. By 1840 he had amassed a large personal collection—40,000 printed books and over 1800 manuscripts—that had some spectacular highlights. He also began dealing in manuscripts and rare printed editions. Styling himself as ‘Count Libri’, he cultivated the image, the demeanour and the curriculum vitae of a great bookman.

  Late in 1845, Libri decided to sell his manuscripts. The following year, Sir Frederic Madden, keeper of the Department of Manuscripts of the British Museum, arrived in Paris with his assistant John Holmes to appraise them. In Libri’s apartment in the Sorbonne the Englishmen found the count a ‘rather corpulent’ fellow who seemed, according to Madden, ‘as if he had never used soap and water or a brush’.

  The room…was not more than about 16 feet wide, but filled with manuscripts on shelves up to the ceiling. The windows had double sashes and a fire of coal and coke burnt in the grate, the heat of which, added to the smell of the pile of vellum around, was so unsufferable, that I gasped for breath. M. Libri perceived the inconvenience we suffered and opened one of the windows, but it was easy to see that a breath of air was disagreeable to him, and his ears were stuffed with cotton, as if to prevent his feeling sensible of it!

  Though the books were dirty and in a disordered state, Madden concluded the collection was indeed a prize, worth in the range of £8000 to £9000. The trustees of the library sought £9000 from the treasury, but the exchequer refused and Libri had to look elsewhere for a buyer. His first thought was to attempt a sale in Turin. Another English purchaser, though, came forward. Lord Ashburnham sent the bookseller Thomas Rodd to Paris to examine the collection. Rodd returned with a positive report and two samples: a seventh-century Pentateuch, and the Hours of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Ashburnham’s offer of £8000 was quickly forthcoming and quickly accepted. In April 1847, sixteen cases of manuscripts arrived at Ashburnham Place.

  Apart from the Libri books, Ashburnham made many individual purchases of manuscripts, and two bulk ones: the Stowe manuscripts, bought from the Duke of Buckingham and containing early Irish codices and Anglo-Saxon charters; and the Barrois manuscripts, bought in 1849 from Joseph Barrois of Lille.

  Libri’s role with the libraries commission had given him special authority to visit and access holdings at all hours, anywhere in France. Armed with his credentials and dressed in a huge cloak—he looked, by all accounts, like a Sicilian bandit—Libri inspected collections across the country. His expertise enabled him to home in on the gems of every library he saw. Indeed, Libri matched his fellow Tuscan Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini in book-hunting prowess. But there the similarity ends.

  Poggio removed books, but his goal seems always to have been their protection. He treated the books well; he found homes for them in Florentine and other libraries and he worked carefully as a scribe, making copies—several of which still survive—of the rediscovered works. Poggio invented the elegant humanist script (based on the Caroline minuscule) that served, after a generation of polishing, as the prototype for Roman fonts. Libri, in contrast, was a vandal, a butcher of books. Behind his respectable veneer lurked the most ruthless, audacious and pernicious book thief of all time.

  There had of course been thefts ever since the very first books. Property crimes of incredible variety mar the history of libraries. Indeed, the relationship stretches right back to the rationale for books existing at all. The purpose of the first books—those tablets in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt—was to prevent fraud. They recorded ownership, so property was harder to steal, and they recorded transactions, making it harder for sellers and buyers to renege. The vast majority of surviving tablets are lists of items and payments: who owned what, and who paid whom and how much.

  In the millennia since the tablets were made, books have been associated with every conceivable type of racket. A large slice of what we know about books and authorship in the Middle Ages and in early modern times has reached us because it was documented in legal prosecutions and disputes. As Burnett Streeter noted in his 1931 survey of chained libraries, ‘in the Middle Ages books were rare, and so too was honesty.’ Dating from the twelfth century, the earliest definitive reference to a Paris bookseller damns him as a rascal who had double-crossed Peter of Blois. The illustrious bookseller H. P. Kraus remarked (accurately, if somewhat self-servingly), ‘you expect every great manuscript to have been stolen at least once.’

  Dr Francis Wilson, a rector who lived at the deanery with Jonathan Swift, was suspected of filching books and of intimidating ‘the increasingly defenceless old man’. Swift’s friends ejected Wilson from the house. Pilfering has been known to reduce libraries to nothing. The collections of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, and the Franciscan convent in Oxford both say much about Oxfordshire’s thieves, who turned both collections into thin air. At around the same time, thieves in nearby Warwickshire reduced the abbot’s library at Stoneleigh Priory to a level that was recorded as In libraria abbatis, nichil. ‘In the library of the abbot, nothing.’

  Chimney cross-bars, which prevent thieves coming down, are just one of the many devices that custodians have used to prevent theft from libraries. Other libraries have solved the problem of security by locking books behind glass, metal stays, metal screens and, such as at the Ambrosian Library in Milan, wide-gauge, wire-work mesh. At the Bodleian’s Arts End, which dates from 1612, the staircases that give access to the upstairs gallery are safely enclosed in timber cages.


  When Montaigne visited the Vatican Library in 1581, he saw books chained to desks. The libraries of Peterhouse and St John’s College at Cambridge lost their chains late in the sixteenth century or early in the seventeenth. We are accustomed to thinking of chained libraries as mediaeval, and of chains as a feature that fell out of use long before the modern era. And yet, as Burnett Streeter found from his survey, university libraries were still using chains well into the eighteenth century.

  Fresh chains were being purchased at Chetham College, Manchester, in 1742, and at the Bodleian in 1751. At The Queen’s College, Oxford, the chains were not taken from the books till 1780; at Merton not till 1792. Magdalen was the last college in Oxford to retain them; here they lasted till 1799.

  These latter chains date from the Enlightenment, not the Dark or Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Another late chained library was installed at Hereford in 1715.

  *

  The modern history of library thefts is full of sorry episodes—but also happy reunions. In 1956 the Folger Shakespeare Library returned to the Boston Athenaeum a book reported missing there in 1867. In 1992 the Folger suffered losses of its own. A professor admitted stealing from the library. In the district court, Stuart Adelman, aged fifty-four, pleaded guilty to one count of interstate transportation of stolen property: rare letters signed by Isaac Newton and Voltaire. Adelman was sentenced to a year in prison. He had sold many of the stolen letters and other documents, but all of them were recovered and returned to the library. Another professor, this one from Ohio State University, stole pages from a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Vatican Library. The manuscript had once belonged to Petrarch. From Christ Church College, Oxford, a specialist in baroque music stole a 1552 work by Vesalius, entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica. The thief was a regular on the conference circuit and had appeared as a musical expert on the BBC. After passing through the hands of several owners and dealers, the book resurfaced in Japan, in the library of a dentistry college. Oxford demanded it back. The thief spent two years in prison, where he was able to improve his Latin.