by Stuart Kells
Thanks to this and other sources, we know not only the names of the first half-dozen librarians—such as Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristophanes of Byzantium—but also their duties and achievements—Callimachus was responsible for the library’s catalogue, for example. We also know that, under the Ptolemies, the office of Alexandrian librarian was a high one, suitable for royal tutors and superannuated military men.
To expand the great library’s famous collections, the authorities at Alexandria adopted a famous policy. Whenever a ship arrived at the city’s port with scrolls on board, the scrolls were taken to the library for copying. When the copying was finished, the new facsimiles were returned to ship, and the originals stayed in the library. Books obtained in this way were identified in the catalogue as ‘from the ships’. Alexandria’s assertive collections policy seems to have been applied in other ways, too. When the library borrowed the works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus from Athens in order to make copies, the copies rather than the originals were sent back to Greece. Once Alexandria became notorious as a book moocher, other cities and libraries refused to lend their books unless the Ptolemies staked large security deposits. According to Galen, the great library could only keep the Athenian books by forfeiting an enormous bond of fifteen talents (450 kilograms) of gold or silver.
Alexandria’s acquisitions policy was a precursor to a law passed by the King of France more than a thousand years later. Established in 1537 by the Ordonnance de Montpellier, ‘legal deposit’ prevented printers and publishers from selling a book unless a copy was given to the royal library at the Château de Blois. The law covered all new books, regardless of their size, cost, genre or language. (After re-establishing this right of legal deposit, the post-revolutionary Bibliothèque Nationale would also assume the power to pre-emptively purchase books at auction sales.) In this and other respects, Alexandria is an important waypoint in a continuum that links the collections, policies and practices of the world’s ancient and modern libraries.
Through a private agreement with the Stationers’ Company, Sir Thomas Bodley established England’s first legal deposit scheme in 1610. The company agreed to send to the Bodleian Library ‘a copy of every book entered in their Register on condition that the books thus given might be borrowed if needed for reprinting, and that the books given to the Library by others might be examined, collated and copied by the Company’. Unlike the Egyptians and the French, Bodley seems to have intended the scheme to be selective rather than comprehensive. Tellingly, he reprimanded the University Librarian, Thomas James, for cataloguing many ‘idle bookes and riffe raffes’ unworthy of the Bodleian. In 1662 the scheme was extended to the Royal Library and the Cambridge University Library, and these collections too obtained much ‘riffe raffe’.
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With such a concentration of books and scholarship, Alexandria was naturally home to spectacular achievements in medicine, astronomy and geometry. Eratosthenes worked out ninety-nine per cent of the circumference of the Earth. Archimedes worked out 99.9 per cent of pi. In the history of Western thought, the library came to rival Athens as an intellectual powerhouse. Alexandria’s collection was specifically a scholars’ library; the Ptolemies regarded men like Archimedes, Eratosthenes and Euclid as the ideal users. A whole other class of user, though, also had a stake in the library.
Not far from Alexandria’s perilous red-light district, the city’s merchant quarter hosted a boisterous array of booksellers. ‘Disreputable’ and ‘unscrupulous’ were the words most often used to describe them. They survived on several rackets, one of which was to bribe the librarians to remove scrolls from the collections; the scrolls were then copied, and the booksellers sold the piratical versions locally and abroad.
The Ptolemies’ appetite for the classics was voracious. Apart from mandating the copying of texts, the king sent his agents far and wide to borrow and buy more and more books. This appetite created another opening for bookworld entrepreneurs. A class of para-literary workers on the fringes of the library produced forgeries, then collaborated with the booksellers to distribute them, and, often, to sell them to the library. Apocryphal Aristotelian treatises were a favourite, and were produced to a convincingly high standard. Only after centuries of subsequent research were they proven to be bogus.
Even legitimate-seeming scholars produced fraudulent works for sale to the library. Posing as an Athenian contemporary and confidant of Thucydides, the scholar Cratippus wrote Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid, ‘in which he made happy use of bombast and anachronism’. The book found its way into the collection, where it was treated as a legitimate text. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch both took the manuscript seriously. This style of work, parasitically piggy-backing on the reputation of a valued author, would become a staple of fraudulent publishing in the early modern era and well into the Enlightenment. Names as famous as Shakespeare, Johnson and Swift would appear on books cobbled together by opportunistic and anonymous authors.
Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé is a lurid re-telling of the shadowy history of Alexandria’s library. Herr Doktor Peter Kien, the novel’s main protagonist, is a middle-aged Sinologist and voracious book-buyer. In Kien’s childhood he had stowed away in a bookshop overnight—just so he could be, like Salmasius, with the books. Now in adulthood, he assembles in his apartment a personal collection of 25,000 volumes, the most important private library in Vienna. He surrounds himself with so many books that he must wall up his windows to accommodate more shelves. Kien’s world is full of dangers, especially those of social interaction and bacteriological infection. One dread, though, stands out above all others. Kien’s insatiable appetite for books is matched by a fear that they will be lost in fire.
Conned by everyone around him, Kien marries his housekeeper Therese—‘a sturdy peasant type’, who has ‘her eye on the main chance’—with the idea that she will dust his books and help keep them safe. Within days of the marriage she begins to take charge. Kien must give up three-quarters of his library as a living space for his new wife. Then he is forced out of his apartment altogether. Homeless, he enters a nightmarish underworld of seedy bars, bungling police, apparitions, molesters, cutthroats and con-artists.
Descending into madness, Kien employs Fischerle, an unscrupulous, chess-playing, hump-backed dwarf, to catalogue the library that exists in the bibliophile’s head. At the local pawnshop, Kien appoints himself principal book-rescuer. Whenever customers arrive with books to pawn, Kien pays for them and sends the would-be hocker away with a lecture on the proper care of books. This gives Fischerle an idea. He and his gang assemble fake parcels of worthless volumes, then take them to the pawnshop. Again Kien pays for them, and the gang members share the proceeds.
While Kien is thus engaged, Therese searches the flat for her husband’s bank book, and for a dead body or some other clue to his cumulative mania. Things come to a head when she appears at the pawnbrokers to sell a pile of his books. At the novel’s climax, Kien returns to his book-filled apartment, sets it alight, climbs to the sixth rung of a ladder, and waits, laughing. The book ends in fire and madness, with Kien’s library destroyed. The Great Library of Alexandria flourished for three centuries, or perhaps as many as nine—from around 300 BC to 642 AD—no one knows for sure. But it, too, ended in mass destruction.
Many different stories have been told about how the library came to an end. Perhaps an accidental blaze destroyed it in 47 BC. Perhaps it was a casualty of a first-century pagan revolt against Alexandria’s Christianisation. Or perhaps Roman Emperor Aurelian’s troops destroyed it in 273 AD when they set fire to Alexandria’s royal quarter. According to the most colourful story, the seventh-century Caliph Omar ordered the library’s books to be distributed among the city’s bathhouses, where they were burned to heat the waters. It took six months, so the story goes, to burn them all. An altogether different school of thought is that, long before Omar, the manuscripts had simply worn out. Papyrus is a terrible material for preserving texts. Without
a large and unwavering commitment to conservation and copying, a library of papyrus scrolls will readily and unceremoniously disintegrate—especially in the damp conditions of a river delta. Alexandria’s library might have just faded away.
Whatever the cause, virtually every scroll in the library was destroyed. In Greek drama alone, the losses were devastating: eighty-three of Aeschylus’s ninety plays were lost, along with sixty-two of Euripides’s eighty and 113 of Sophocles’s 120. Some books, though, including those backstreet bootleg copies, found their way into collections in Greece, the Levant and especially Constantinople. Today, the editions pirated by booksellers account for a high proportion of the surviving texts from Alexandria.
For however many centuries, Alexandria had preserved and promoted the Greek literary heritage. In turn, that tradition passed to the great libraries of Constantinople—the Imperial, Patriarcha and University libraries—which maintained it for another thousand years. Though scholars at those libraries produced little that was new or creative, they edited, annotated and elucidated the standard classical texts, thereby guarding them for the future.
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. Many of the Greek scholars who’d established schools on the shores of the Bosphorus left for Italy. Italians at the same time rushed to those shores to acquire books. The Sicilian humanist, Hellenist and manuscript collector Giovanni Aurispa went to great lengths to obtain manuscripts there: ‘I remember having given up my clothes to the Greeks in Constantinople in order to get codices—something for which I feel neither shame nor regret.’
By sea and by land, along trade routes and pilgrim routes, the books and texts from Constantinople fed Eastern and Western monasteries and other public and private collections such as the Papal Library, the Ambrosian and the Laurentian. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire elevated Rome, Milan and Florence as centres of classical learning. It also helped make Venice a centre for trade in Greek manuscripts. Impacts were felt further afield, too, at emerging and later libraries such as the Bodleian, Königsberg and Wolfenbüttel. Ultimately, books and texts from Constantinople nourished the world. The histories of humankind’s libraries are intricately interwoven. Occurring over millennial timeframes, the inter-library movement of books and ideas marked out nonlinear trails of study, editing, translation, exchange, innovation and appropriation—tracks that are just as arcane and marvellous as the sacred songlines of ancient Australia.
Books in bed
Books will sleep with you. The seventeenth-century Belgian politician and bibliophile Charles van Hulthem assembled a personal collection of 32,000 volumes, ‘all excellent copies’, many of them great rarities. In Great Libraries, Anthony Hobson wrote of how the books ‘filled to overflowing one house in Brussels and another in Ghent. Books were heaped on every table, so that there was never room to spread a tablecloth, and stood in piles in the alcove where he slept’. Van Hulthem allowed no fire in the house—that would be just too dangerous. On cold nights he kept warm in bed by spreading folios on his feet. The best book for this purpose was Barlaeus’s voluminous account of Maurice of Nassau’s expedition to Brazil. Van Hulthem would sometimes be found ‘contemplating with infantile pleasure an engraving of a fine female torso’—his sole contact with the opposite sex.
The Medici librarian Antonio di Marco Magliabecchi was renowned as a literary glutton who possessed a memory ‘like wax to receive and marble to retain’. According to Holbrook Jackson, author of Anatomy of Bibliomania, Magliabecchi ‘lived in a cavern of books, slept on them, wallowed in them’;
they were his bed and board, his only furniture, his chiefest need. For sleep he spread an old rug over a heap of them and so composed himself; or he would cast himself, fully clothed, among the books which covered his couch.
Jackson describes another bibliomaniac, active at the start of the nineteenth century. His collection was ‘choice, costly, and copious’, and no man loved more to ‘embed himself ’ among the books and documents:
his pillow-case, Columbus’s Letter of 1493, stitched to the original Challenge of Crichton; his counterpane, the large paper Hearnes, formerly in Dr Mead’s library, ‘still glittering in their primitive morocco attire’; his mattress, large paper Dugdales; his bed-curtains, ‘slips of the original Bayeux Tapestry’.
Jeanette Winterson is another bibliophile who slept on a bed of books. Her parents were strict Pentecostal evangelists. In her childhood the outside toilet was the best venue for clandestine reading. There, Winterson first read Freud and D. H. Lawrence, ‘and perhaps that was the best place, after all’, she remarked. A rubber torch was the only source of reading light. ‘I had to divide my money from a Saturday job, between buying books and buying batteries.’ Winterson’s mother knew exactly how many Evereadies were needed ‘to illuminate the gap that separated the toilet paper from its function’.
Once I had tucked the book back down my knickers to get it indoors again, I had to find somewhere to hide it, and anyone with a single bed, standard size, and paperbacks, standard size, will discover that seventy-seven can be accommodated per layer under the mattress.
As her collection grew and her bed began visibly to rise, Winterson worried that her mother might notice. When in fact she did, the books fed the fire.
The designers of the British Museum’s famous reading room have achieved the wonderful illusion that the enormous dome is suspended, like Jeanette Winterson’s mattress, on layers of books.
CHAPTER 3
In Pursuit of Perfection
The rise of the codex
Throughout the classical world, the papyrus scroll was the dominant form of book. The days of scroll libraries, though, were always numbered. As a surface for writing, parchment is demonstrably superior to papyrus. More tolerant of folding and of damp, it is also easier to obtain and therefore harder to monopolise. Unlike papyrus scrolls, sheets of parchment will happily take ink on both sides. Cut and folded into rectangular gatherings, parchment can be used to make hinged books—called codices—that store more information with less space. The reader can jump to a chapter or passage without manually scrolling through nine metres of papyrus. Codices also suit reference guides such as contents pages, indexes and page numbers—guides that are practically useless in scrolls. Gradually, the parchment codex replaced the papyrus scroll.
If we search back through history to find the very first codex, we can point to several contenders for that honour. Starting in 1978, Australian and North American archaeologists excavated the Dakhleh Oasis in the Sahara. They found an accounts book that dated from the fourth century. The book has been called the earliest complete example of a codex. Each of its thin wooden leaves, thirteen by thirty-three centimetres, was bored with four holes on the left side, to be bound with cord into eight-leaf gatherings. The effect was not unlike the even earlier ‘tablet books’ that ancient Greeks carried on their belts as a signifier of learning. Made by hinging clay, wood or metal tablets together into a diptych or polyptych, these stiff books, and the Dakhleh wooden version, are not true codices—but they helped prove the concept.
Another proto-codex in the classical era was made with sheets of papyrus, stabbed and laced at one end. Cicero, in his Epistles to Atticus (56 BC), suggested that papyrus sheets may also have been glued into codex form. The poet Martial, in his first-century Apophoreta, praised the compactness of the codex format and commended it to his readers in words that later sellers of pocket classics and paperbacks would also use. ‘Assign your book-boxes to the great, this copy of me one hand can grasp.’ Whether stabbed or glued, such brittle papyrus codices could only ever be a temporary solution.
The first recognisably modern codices, with strong and flexible parchment pages, did not arrive until around 100 AD, or perhaps a little later. That model was perfected over subsequent centuries until, probably in an early monastic workshop, an inventive binder fastened gatherings of parchment leaves to cords and (crucially, for strength) to each other. The binder then bonded the sewn
gatherings by applying glue to their back. This method resulted in a book block that would hold its shape, open flat on a table, and protect the text when the book was not in use. C. S. Lewis remarked that the codex was one of the two most important innovations of the so-called Dark Ages. The other was the stirrup.
The genesis of parchment codices may owe a debt to another development in the late classical period. In Roman times, shortly before the Christian era, the growing use of desks led writers to prefer square sheets of parchment, which in turn were well suited to the codex format. The intimate relationship between furniture design, book formats and library layouts would persist over the next 2000 years or so.
In the Middle Ages, most of Europe’s libraries were attached to cathedrals and monasteries, and most ecclesiastical and monastic books were codices. The era of the monastic library began with Cassiodorus and St Benedict, whose monasteries of Vivarium and Monte Cassino were founded in the sixth century. Reading and copying came together as the basis for the great tradition of monastic scriptoria, in which books were painstakingly copied and decorated.
