The Library

by Stuart Kells

  *

  Despite its exceptionally picturesque foundation story, St Gall continued to be a place of tragedy. Soon after the Tuscans’ visit, the monastery was again devastated by fire (the manuscripts in Hartmut Tower once more escaped extinction). The Toggenburg War of 1712, the last sectarian war of the old Swiss Confederation, saw victorious troops from Zurich and Berne occupy and loot the abbey, setting back its rococo revival. Designating the manuscripts and printed works as war booty, the victors took half of them to Zurich and the rest to Berne.

  Upon the signing of a peace treaty in 1718, most of the books were returned to St Gall, but Zurich retained approximately 100 items, including a few dozen important mediaeval and early modern manuscripts, as well as a quantity of printed books, paintings, astronomical devices, and Prince-Abbot Bernhard Muller’s cosmographical globe. The globe, whose diameter is more than 120 centimetres, was made before 1575, probably in northern Germany. A masterpiece of mapmaking and globemaking, it shows both terrestrial and celestial terrains—the constellations were drawn in the oceans.

  Later in the eighteenth century, St Gall entered a new golden era, not of book production but of book curatorship and display. The abbot engaged master builders and master craftsmen to construct a perfect home for all the books that had survived the perils of scissor-happy monks; squalid, mouldy, wormy confinement in the basement of Hartmut Tower; the rescuing hands of papal secretaries from Tuscany; invasion and war in 926 and 1712; and the fires of 937 and 1418. Construction of the new library commenced in 1758 and lasted a decade. The elderly master builder Peter Thumb was responsible for the new structure. Working in cherry, walnut, olive and pine, the cabinetmaker Gabriel Loser crafted the elaborate timber fittings and the floor. Johann and Matthais Giggel completed the stucco work. The deliberate imperfections encountered in early manuscripts had no place in the realisation of the library. Featuring an undulating gallery, ornate Corinthian columns and pilasters, and a pinewood floor inlaid with walnut, the new hall at St Gall came very close to aesthetic perfection; it is one of the best surviving examples of baroque and rococo architecture.

  Roman numerals from I to XIV divide the hall into sections, each with a particular subject matter. Plaster cherubs represent the different subjects: poet, physician, botanist, singer, painter, gardener, composer, merchant, geographer. Josef Wannenmacher painted the elaborate ceiling in 1762 and 1763. It shows the Virgin Mary (representing Divine Wisdom) and, in the lunettes over the four large window embrasures, the Greek and Latin Church Fathers—Gregory the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Anselm of Canterbury, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Basil, Jerome, John Chrysostom—as the guiding lights for the monastery. Executed in an illusionistic, trompe l’œil style called quadratura (popularised in the seventeenth century by Jesuit monk Andrea Pozzo), the ceiling creates an illusion of bookcases extending upwards into the heavens. Surrounded by clouds and cherubs, St Augustine sits atop a celestial, three-dimensional throne of books. All fantasy and show business, the library is a masterpiece.

  Pozzo’s treatise Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, published in two volumes in 1693 and 1700, codified a ‘scenographic’ approach to architecture—one that would flourish in Italy and be highly influential throughout Europe for over a century. In the German baroque library of Wiblingen Abbey, the trompe l’œil is so effective that visitors struggle to tell which architectural features are real and which are illusory. Widely translated, Pozzo’s treatise was addressed to ‘the Lovers of Perspective’. Arguing that ‘Perspective never appears more graceful than in Architecture’, Pozzo provided a hundred almost obsessive examples of how to achieve perfect perspective.

  At St Gall, the library ceiling’s rococo plasterwork created separate fields in which Wannenmacher depicted the first four ecumenical councils: Chalcedon, Constantinople, Ephesus and Nicaea. The three-dimensional illusion achieves its greatest visual impact when the images are viewed from the ends of the library’s main hall. Above the windows, the artist painted more quadratura scenes of the great church fathers. And finally, a series of smaller monochrome images between the hall’s windows show the order’s monks at work. Over the entrance to the library there is a Greek inscription that echoes the one from Alexandria and that reads, loosely translated, ‘Sanatorium for the soul’.

  The history of St Gall is rich with tragedies, and the next one to befall St Gall was especially bitter. No sooner had the monks built the perfect library than it was taken from them.

  In 1803 the Napoleonic Act of Mediation elevated St Gall as a sovereign canton. Two years later, the canton abolished what had been, according to St Gall historian Werner Vogler, ‘one of the most illustrious, flourishing and scholarly monasteries of the Western world’. The monastery was dissolved, the monks ‘thrown out’. Other nearby monasteries and convents were also secularised, such as the island abbey at Lindau on Lake Constance. At St Gall, parts of the abbey complex became the canton’s offices. The abbey itself became the cathedral for a new bishop. A decree of 1813 transferred responsibility for the abbey’s archives and library to the Catholic administration of the state of St Gall. Once again, the library survived.

  Mean-spirited collectors

  Not all collectors approach the hunt in good spirit. Born in 1836, David Scott Mitchell became Australia’s greatest collector of Australiana. As the rate of his buying accelerated, his home at 17 Darlinghurst Road, Sydney, began to bulge with books. A. H. Spencer, who early in his bookman career visited the home regularly as a messenger boy for the booksellers Angus & Robertson, described Mitchell’s living space thus: ‘Books, pamphlets, maps, pictures, newspapers, manuscripts, filling a vast amount of shelving and stacked upon the floor, tables and chairs in every room, and up the staircase.’ The books even infiltrated the maid’s attic.

  Mitchell developed a toxic rivalry with another collector, Alfred Lee. When a local doctor passed away, a local bookseller (William Dymock) purchased the doctor’s library. Lee got to it first and put aside a choice pile of books. When Mitchell arrived at the shop he saw Lee’s pile.

  ‘What are those there?’ he asked the bookseller.

  ‘Oh, they were picked out by Mr Lee.’

  ‘How much do they come to?’

  ‘Three hundred pounds, Mr Mitchell.’

  ‘Put them into my cab at once,’ Mitchell said, ‘or I’ll never come into this shop again.’ The bookseller did as he was told while Mitchell went on making his own selection. When Lee discovered what had happened, his reaction ‘could only be printed on asbestos’.

  Lee owned an especially desirable prize: Sir Joseph Banks’s manuscript journal. Having tried several times to induce Lee to sell it, Mitchell gave it one last go. Lee refused, declaring he would sell his library before he parted with that treasure.

  ‘Well,’ Mitchell said, ‘put a price on the lot.’

  ‘Seven thousand pounds.’

  ‘Done. When will you call for your cheque?’

  At the appointed time, Lee knocked at 17 Darlinghurst Road. The door opened a crack and Old Sarah the housekeeper poked out the envelope. ‘Good morning,’ she said, then closed the door.

  Holbrook Jackson wrote of an almost demonic figure: a wealthy Irish book collector who was known ‘by many hard names’ such as ‘Vampire’ and ‘Dragon’. The collector’s hoard of books filled garrets, cellars and warehouses, ‘not for his own delight, but to prevent others enjoying them’. Possessing an instinct for knowing what other people wanted, the collector snatched at auctions those volumes most desired by his rival bidders. The rivals, though, settled on a solution. By feigning interest in cheap books, and by running them up to high prices, the rivals beat ‘the devouring monster’, who ‘disappeared as mysteriously as he had come’.

  CHAPTER 5

  Free for All

  The abundance of books in the printing era

  Printing reached England in 1476 when William Caxton set up his press at Westminster. He had already operated a p
ress, in Bruges, and had first encountered printing in Cologne. By 1500, there were five printers working in London. By 1523, there were thirty-three. The growth of printing in England was intimately linked to the availability of a viable alternative to parchment.

  John Tate set up England’s first paper mill in 1490 near Stevenage, in Hertfordshire. Bartholomaeus Anglicus mentions Tate’s mill in the 1495–96 book De Proprietatibus Rerum, which was translated by John Trevisa and printed by Wynken de Worde, on Tate paper. A poem printed in the colophon stated:

  And also of your charyte call to remembraunce

  The soule of William Caxton, first prynter of this boke

  In laten tonge at Coleyn hymself to avaunce

  That every well disposyd man may thereon loke

  And John Tate the yonger, Joye mote he broke

  Whiche late hathe in Englonde doo make this paper thynne

  That now in our englyssh this boke is prynted inne.

  Tate’s mill failed, possibly due to competition from discounted Dutch paper, but in 1588 Sir John Spilman established a commercially successful mill at Dartford in Kent. The queen granted Spilman special privileges for the collection of rags. Late in the sixteenth century and early in the seventeenth, other mills were established in Buckinghamshire, Staffordshire (at Cannock Chase), Oxfordshire, Surrey and near Edinburgh. Paper was also imported from the Continent, as was, until about 1567, most printing type.

  For seven centuries the Chinese guarded the secret of paper manufacture. They also tried to eliminate other Asian centres of paper production, to ensure the kind of monopoly the Ptolemies had enjoyed over papyrus. The paper monopoly, though, was inherently fragile. At the Battle of Talas, in 751, the Ottoman Turks defeated the T’ang army. Prisoners were taken to Samarkand, where the local people learned the secrets of papermaking. Soon the people of Samarkand were producing paper in large quantities for export. Thereafter, the technology as well as the product spread inexorably. Paper production was important in Baghdad late in the eighth century. Arab traders brought paper to Europe as early as 1085. Damascus was a major supplier of paper to Europe until the fifteenth century. Two of papermaking’s first footholds on the European continent were in Muslim Spain, at Toledo and Xàtiva. France had a paper mill by 1190, and by the early fourteenth century Italy had mills at Fabriano, Treviso and elsewhere.

  The craft of papermaking is surprisingly simple. First, rags are boiled with lime and washed and beaten to a pulp that is transferred to a vat and agitated. A frame stretched with a fine wire screen is then dipped into the pulp and shaken to spread the fibres. When the excess liquid has drained off, the frame is dismantled and the raw paper is pressed on a sheet of felt. A stack of felts interlaced with paper sheets is then placed in a press and squeezed to remove moisture. The sheets are then hung to dry. Signs of this procedure are revealed when the paper is held up to the light. ‘Chain lines’ are left by the metal frame and show up as widely spaced lines running at right angles to the closely set parallel wire or ‘laid’ lines. Gradually, just as parchment had replaced papyrus, paper superseded parchment as the principal material for making books.

  Like papermaking, the technology of printing with moveable type arrived in Europe having already proven itself in the far east. An early and simple form of printing—the ‘block book’—was developed in China and Korea in the eighth century as a way to print images. Building on these foundations, the Chinese made moveable type from wood and clay in the eleventh century. In Korea, as early as the fourteenth century, individual characters were cast in metal. When the technology reached Europe, a young engraver and gem-cutter refined it even further. In so doing, he kicked off a revolution in the shape and size of libraries, and the shape and size of world culture.

  Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was born in Mainz around the year 1400. By the late 1430s, he was still in Mainz and was borrowing money for an entrepreneurial venture that required quantities of lead and a wooden hand-press, like the ones used by vintners and bookbinders. In 1450 he borrowed a further 800 guilders from Johannes Fust, a wealthy goldsmith, lawyer and moneylender. Like most entrepreneurs, Gutenberg would soon run out of funds; two years after the first Fust loan, he borrowed a further 800 guilders from the goldsmith.

  The central insight of Gutenberg’s invention was that much could be gained in speed and efficiency if the letters of the alphabet were cut in the form of reusable type. Each page of text could be printed from individual letters locked in a frame; the letters could then be unlocked and reused to print further pages. The development of his method of printing took him several years of trial, error and experimentation. For it to work, the method required dozens of subsidiary and complementary innovations, such as suitable paper, fine metalworking and oil-based inks. One of the most difficult stages to perfect was the casting of individual letters from a suitable alloy. (The screw-press was not the only element of Gutenberg’s technology to have been influenced by bookbinding. The metal punches with which binders decorated leather were a precursor to Gutenberg’s punches and type.)

  In the beginning, Gutenberg’s bread-and-butter printing included papal indulgences; the earliest of these to come from his printery carries a date of 1454. Even before that date, Gutenberg was working on a much grander and more ambitious project: a large, two-volume Bible containing over 1200 pages of Latin text, printed in two columns of forty-two lines each. The titles, chapter headings and initials would be added by hand, just as they had been in illuminated manuscripts. (The forty-two-line Bible is sometimes referred to as the ‘Mazarin Bible’ because its first rigorous bibliographical description was made for the great Parisian library of Cardinal Mazarin.)

  Sometime near the year 1452, Peter Schoeffer joined Gutenberg as an apprentice. Schoeffer knew Gutenberg’s backer: Fust had sent Schoeffer to Paris to train at the university as a calligrapher, engraver and manuscript copyist. Assisted by Schoeffer, Gutenberg produced about 180 copies of the forty-two-line Bible, some on vellum but most on paper.

  There are European printed books that pre-date Gutenberg’s. Block books were produced in Europe by the mid fifteenth century, as were single devotional woodcut prints. Laurens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem printed around the time of Gutenberg’s first experiments, and may in fact have been the first European to print with moveable type. But his productions were of a low standard; Coster was a less exacting craftsman than the gem-cutter from Mainz. Gutenberg was the first craftsman in Europe to make letterpress printing viable and beautiful. He took sample pages of his Bible to the Frankfurt Trade Fair (Frankfurter Messe). Enea Silvio Piccolomini saw them, and in 1455 he wrote to the Cardinal of Carvajal in Wiener, Neustadt. The Bible featured ‘very clear and very proper lettering, and without any faults, which Your Eminence would have been able to read effortlessly with no glasses’. Even before the books were finished, customers came forward to buy them.

  Things were going well for Gutenberg, until disaster struck. Fust expected a prompt return on his 1600 guilders, but Gutenberg was taking too long. In 1455, even though the Bible was all but finished, Fust foreclosed on the original loan and took Gutenberg to court. The moneylender prevailed and took over the valuable security: the printer’s equipment and edition. Gutenberg was ruined.

  After the trial, Schoeffer continued the business in partnership with Fust. The former apprentice knew where his future lay; he cemented the partnership by marrying Fust’s only daughter, Christina. (In court, Schoeffer had been the principal witness against Gutenberg. Schoeffer’s Fustian links led to talk of a pact to bring down the printer from the inside and take control of his marvellous innovation.) Fust and Schoeffer would soon produce the landmark 1462 Mainz Bible. In the history of the book, Gutenberg was shunted aside. His former financier and his former apprentice made no mention of him in their productions. He died in 1468; decades would pass before he received any credit for his future-shaping achievements. In 1499 Ulrich Zell, the first printer of Cologne, stated emphatically
and definitively that Johann Gutenberg was the true inventor of printing.

  In the first fifty years after Gutenberg, printing presses sprang up in virtually every significant urban centre in Europe. Though the technology took hold only gradually, and though the first printers preferred to use parchment and took pains to replicate the look and feel of manuscripts, the world had undergone a step change in book media. The advent of printing enabled books to be produced in far greater numbers. It is estimated that, before the printing press, there were 50,000 books in the whole of Europe. Fifty years after Gutenberg’s first Bible, the number of books exceeded 8 million, the number of editions 28,000. An efficient printer could produce in one day what a competent scribe could accomplish in six months. In the first hundred years of printing, more books were produced than in the previous thousand years of scribework. This revolution drove a thousand innovations in how ideas and knowledge were spread, and an equal number of innovations in libraries.

  (Mediaeval scribes may have introduced deliberate imperfections into their manuscripts, but the arrival of printing opened the way for a new kind of error. The first Bibles to be printed in English are noted, and indeed classified—as He bibles, She bibles, Breeches bibles, Wicked bibles and so on—for their typographical and editorial idiosyncrasies, some of which are highly regrettable. The Wicked Bible of 1631, for example, left out a critical word, rendering the seventh commandment as, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’. The whole edition was recalled; Barker the printer would never print again; and scarcely a copy of that now sought-after version exists today.)

  Book-makers targeted their wares not only at the clergy and the aristocracy, but also at scholars, who could now debate books over long distances by citing page numbers and diagrams from identical printed copies. A yet more important target was the newly extensive middle class. Publishers and printers fed the appetite for editions of a manageable size. The great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius produced, in an octavo format, a series of well-edited and limpidly printed ‘pocket’ editions of the classics, suitable for carrying around and even more so for displaying in bookcases at home. Aldus introduced new typefaces that were both beautiful and economical. The ‘italic’ font, for example, allowed more words to fit on the page, without sacrificing legibility or elegance. The Bolognese punch-cutter Francesco Griffo created that font, building on the scriptorial innovations of Poggio’s friend Niccolò Niccoli.