The Library

by Stuart Kells

  Aldus had set up his press in 1490, shortly after arriving in Venice. An ardent admirer of the ancient literature of Athens and Alexandria and Constantinople, he employed humanist scholars and Greek compositors to issue scholarly editions, in Greek, of classics by Aristophanes, Euripides, Herodotus and Sophocles, then Latin classics by Virgil, Pliny and other authors. Apart from the first italic typeface, Francesco Griffo also produced for Aldus a Greek font and fine Roman ones.

  In 1499 Aldus printed the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Attributed to Francesco Colonna, a Dominican monk, the book is an epic allegory of the search for lost love. Cleverly concealed in the book, the author’s name is revealed by taking the first letter from each chapter. The letters spell out Poliam frater Franciscus Columna peramavit: ‘Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia tremendously.’ Regarded as one of the finest books ever made, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is renowned for the beauty of its design, and how seamlessly it integrated Griffo’s Roman type with 174 woodcuts. The book was highly influential: among other reverberations, it caused French printers to switch from Gothic to Roman typefaces.

  Aldus’s books came to be prized by libraries and collectors around the world. In the nineteenth century, upon the death of the Marquis of Hastings—better known as a horse man than a book man—the Marquis’s possessions were to be auctioned. Andrew Lang tells the story of how Didot, the biographer of Aldus, had a sixth bibliographical sense that led him to guess the Marquis ‘might have owned something in his line’. Didot sent his agent to the English town where the auction was to be held. Among the books ‘dragged out of some mouldy store-room’—what Lang called (with words that Poggio and Rustici might have used) ‘a rubbish heap in an English cellar’—was the large-paper copy of Homer that Aldus had printed then presented to King Francis I of France, the monarch who also owned Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’. When Didot’s agent found the book, ‘part of the original binding [was] still clinging to the leaves’. Once it was in Didot’s hands he sent it to ‘the hospital for books’—the fine binder who only worked for ‘dukes, millionaires and Rothschilds’, and who restored the king’s arms and devices on the book’s cover.

  To reach the world’s new readers, and their public and private libraries, printer-publishers exploited the newly dug channels of international commerce. The Frankfurt Book Fair, or Frankfurter Buchmesse, began in 1478 or thereabouts. It convened each year towards the end of Lent—just as the Benedictine monks were finishing their annual read-through of the scriptures—and in late summer. Though many books continued to be written and printed in Latin, more and more books in the vernacular languages appeared. The Renaissance was an era of translation. By 1528, for example, Livy, Suetonius, Thucydides and Xenophon were all available in French. This made the texts accessible to an audience that was neither academic nor clerical.

  William Caxton translated with vigour. Of the hundred or so surviving Caxton editions, about seventy were published in English. Many of these—including the first book printed in that language, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye—were translated by Caxton himself. To Lady Margaret Beaufort, the Queen Mother, he dedicated his translation of a romance, with these words:

  Bysechynge my sayd ladyes bountyuous grace to receyve this lityll boke in gree of me, her humble servaunt, and to pardoune me of the rude and comyn Englyshe, where as shall be found faulte; for I confesse me not lerned ne knowynge the arte of rethoryk ne of suche gaye termes as now be sayd in these dayes and used. Bat I hope that it shall be understonden of the redars and herers—and that shall suffyse.

  Greater access to books and learning in turn promised greater social mobility. In 1507, the biographer of a German aristocrat warned that his caste had neglected learning, ‘whereas the children of peasants have taken to study and thereby come to large bishoprics and high legal offices…so that, as the common proverb says, the chairs have jumped upon the table’.

  *

  In October 2014 nineteen-year-old Kendra Sunderland simultaneously filmed and pleasured herself on the sixth floor of the Valley Library at Oregon State University. The film became one of the most watched on the internet. Copycat productions appeared, breathing life into memes, gifs, spinoffs and the ‘sexy librarian’ topos. Sunderland was charged with public indecency. In court she pleaded guilty—the evidence was incontrovertible—and the judge fined her $1000. A career in digital porn followed.

  Though the incident caused a scandal at the library, Sunderland can claim affinity with a tradition that dates back at least as far as ancient Rome. A remarkable number of explicit sculptures and implements and murals have been found in excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum. A famous example from the library at Herculaneum’s Epicurean Villa of the Papyri is the marble statue of Pan making unmistakable love to a she-goat. The word ‘pornography’ entered English after these discoveries. Webster’s 1864 dictionary defined the word with reference to ‘licentious painting employed to decorate the walls of rooms sacred to bacchanalian orgies, examples of which exist in Pompeii’.

  Eighteenth-century Italy and France were enormously productive of printed pornography and other forbidden books. Subjects spanned the arts of seduction, prostitution and flagellation. Ladies and gentlemen from across Europe gathered choice examples for their private libraries. But printed smut was not solely the preserve of the upper classes. On the eve of the French revolution, the restive masses gobbled up pamphlets and broadsides—chroniques scandaleuses—on lurid topics such as the king’s impotence and Marie Antoinette’s bisexuality.

  Despite the popularity of erotica, its collection has always carried a stigma. In his 1877 series of satirical dialogues that went under the title The New Republic, W. H. Mallock pictured Walter Pater in the guise of ‘Mr Rose’.

  Mr Rose…is more than a little odd. He is made to show undue interest in certain books of a curious character, including the Cultes Secrets des Dames Romaines, which occupy a locked compartment of his host’s bookcase. There is a faint suggestion that his languid enthusiasms are not only sickly but even a bit dubious in morality.

  Erotic collections have been assembled in unlikely places. Garages, vicarages, working men’s cottages. One of the largest collections of pornographic literature in Latin America was formed by beloved children’s book author Constancio C. Vigil. Major institutional libraries also collected pornography and erotica. For most of the past century, an air of secrecy and coyness surrounded such holdings as the British Museum’s ‘Secretum’, the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Enfer collection, and the library at San Francisco’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. In 1950, after viewing Henry Fuseli drawings in the British Museum, the Folger librarian Louis Wright observed that some of the drawings were regarded as so pornographic they were fit only for specialists who were allowed just a few scientific peeks. (One superintendent at the museum was asked for permission to consult a pornographic book in the collection. ‘Are you a doctor or a psychologist?’ he asked. The reader answered ‘No’, and access was refused.) Erotic books in the New York Public Library—identified in the catalogue with a discreet triple-star code—spent many decades locked in cages.

  During the Cold War, the Russian State Library stockpiled publications banned by the Soviet government for being ‘ideologically harmful’. Known as the spetskhran (‘Special Storage Section’) the hoard included thousands of erotic and pornographic works from around the world, ranging from Japanese Ukiyo-e engravings to Nixon-era romance novels. (In her introduction to The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton recalled a conversation with Henry James in which she mentioned the type of novel ‘that used euphemistically to be called “unpleasant”’. ‘You know,’ Wharton told James, ‘I was rather disappointed; that book wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected.’ James replied with a twinkle, ‘Ah, my dear, the abysses are all so shallow.’)

  For people who grew up in the West in the present century, censorship is almost an alien and antique concept. Few books are banned; the Anarchist’s Cookb
ook comes to mind, along with one or two other dangerous manuals. But for people who grew up in the twentieth century, censorship was commonplace. And censorship was mostly about sex. Think Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Portnoy’s Complaint, Ulysses, Lolita. (In 1972 Oakland County’s circuit judge found many reasons to ban Slaughterhouse-Five from local public schools, accusing it of being depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian. The following year, a school board in North Dakota destroyed thirty-two copies of the novel in the school’s coal burner.)

  In the first years of censorship, things were very different. Sex was the least of the censors’ worries. In England, for example, the primary concern of the Tudors was the eradication of heretical and treasonous works. Except in the most extreme cases, lewd and bawdy literature was tolerated.

  The initial period of printing was somewhat of a free-for-all. With all the reading and translating and jumping on tables, something just had to be done. Censorship began in Germany in 1475. Soon after, Pope Sixtus IV empowered the University of Cologne to license the publication of books. Producers, sellers and readers of unauthorised books faced a plethora of punishments. Offenders could be fined or excommunicated. Their books could be burned, or they themselves could be. (In 1512 in The Hague, for example, the Inquisition burned a ‘relapsed heretic’, Herman of Rijswijk, along with his books.)

  The first censors’ justifications would be reused many times: books had become much more accessible, especially to the ‘less instructed and more excitable’ middle and lower classes; new ideas were springing up, including worryingly unorthodox social and religious ones; unfettered distribution of books threatened political, moral and doctrinal values. Control of print was necessary to ensure the safety and stability of church and state. A decade after the Cologne licence, a similar regime came into force in the archdiocese of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg’s home town.

  In 1501 Pope Alexander VI extended censorship to the whole of Germany. Bishops or their deputies punished the printers of unauthorised religious works by excommunication and fines. The introduction of religious censorship in Italy followed a similar pattern. Venice, 1480; Treviso, 1491; and by 1515, coverage of the whole peninsula. When the religious and secular authorities of other countries followed suit and initiated censorship, many of them used German and Italian models.

  Book-burners set fires on both sides of the Protestant Reformation. In 1520 there were public burnings of Luther’s works at Cologne and Louvain. Luther burned papal edicts and decretals in Wittenberg. He also sought bans on works by Protestants with whom he disagreed.

  The 1521 Edict of Worms was the instrument through which the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V prohibited the printing, possessing and reading of any works by Luther. The Bavarian State Library in Munich imposed special conditions on unorthodox works. ‘Protestant theology, on the Papal legate’s advice, was separately shelved and in theory available only in exceptional circumstances.’ Thomas Platter left behind a diary that is important for sixteenth-century evidence about the literary culture of the time. In 1599 he visited London where he saw, at the Globe Theatre, an early production of Julius Caesar. Platter also recorded a 1595 visit to the Jesuit College at Tournon. Young Platter and his companion, Dr Collado, saw there a copy of the Calvinist Geneva Bible. ‘Collado wanted to open it, but one of the fathers angrily forbade it, saying that it was a work of the damned.’

  The year after censorship began in Cologne, William Caxton set up his printing press at Westminster. In mediaeval England, political trouble-makers had been prosecuted under old laws of treason and heresy. Now, the Tudor monarchs made new regulations to control printing and the spread of books. Henry VIII’s first act of censorship was to stem the importation and distribution of Lutheran tracts. In 1520 and 1529 lists were compiled of Lutheran writers whose works would be prohibited in England. Ecclesiastical courts were empowered to prosecute printers and owners of the forbidden books. When, in 1534, Henry broke with the Catholic Church, this apparatus was retained but its targets changed. The king also went further by establishing a preventative form of censorship. The Proclamation of 1538 was created to ‘expel and avoid the occasion of errors and opinions opined’. Before a book could be printed, it had to be authorised by the king, the Privy Council or a bishop. To prevent foreign books from slipping past the censor, books printed abroad were banned altogether.

  Henry’s daughter Mary Tudor expanded censorship even further by creating the Stationers’ Company, a London guild of printers and booksellers and binders. In 1557 she granted the company a royal charter to regulate the printing trade and ensure no treasonous or seditious works were issued. Members of the company could seize and destroy unlicensed books. Only members of the company could own a printing press.

  For the Catholic faithful, the Vatican banned bawdy books and purged the most racy and anticlerical passages from literary classics such as the Decameron. References to God replaced references to the role of Fortune in human affairs. The works of heretics, occultists and Machiavelli were placed on the banned list, as was Lorenzo Valla’s book about the forged Donation of Constantine, and Poggio’s book of jokes. In 1559 the church included the Facetiae in the Index of banned heretical, anti-clerical and suspect books. In all, the Index contained the entire works of approximately 550 authors, plus some individual titles. The Tridentine Index of 1564 extended the list of forbidden printed books. It included a ninth-century theological work, the Libri Carolini; fourteenth-century writings by John Wycliffe (including De Sacramento altaris, in which he denied the transubstantiation of Christ); Reuchlin’s speculative Der Augenspiegel (1511); and a variety of theological, medical, botanical, zoological and legal books by Protestant scholars. Later editions of the Index included Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, whose first volume appeared in 1751. The twentieth and final edition of the Vatican’s Index appeared in 1948. Pope Paul VI formally discontinued the Index on 14 June 1966.

  Curiosities

  In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a ‘mathom’ is any portable object for which a Hobbit has no immediate use, but is unwilling to throw away. The ‘mathom house’ is a museum where the Shire’s antiquities, some of them of questionable value, are displayed. Individual Hobbit families keep their mathoms in studies, libraries and cupboards—most Hobbits live underground and do not have attics.

  According to Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner, Tolkien revived ‘mathom’ from Old English, where it meant ‘something valuable, an item of treasure’. The word has Gothic and Germanic roots that relate to the gifts warriors exchanged to cement friendships and alliances. Beowulf described an ancient king’s funeral at which a treasure of mathoms was laid upon his bosom. The Old English Chronicle from the year 1110 described an English princess taking mathoms to Germany as part of her dowry. Ormulum (c. 1200) discussed the three kings visiting the infant Jesus, each of them presenting ‘hiss hord off hise madmess’ (mathoms).

  Gilliver, Marshall and Weiner note how Tolkien repurposed the term.

  Tolkien brought it down in the world, for among the hobbits it denotes a piece of bric-a-brac, something that is only subjectively a treasure because you don’t want to part with it, although at the same time it is clear that the giving of presents, many of which were probably mathoms, was a highly important part of hobbit life.

  Tolkien’s use of the word befits the Shire, whose Hobbit citizens are neither aristocratic not militaristic.

  The concept of a mathom house had its analogy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Popularised as an Enlightenment-Age expression of wonder at the physical world, the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ was a feature of many libraries, public and private. Also known as a Kunstkabinett and a Wunderkammer, the cabinet might be a piece of furniture or an entire room dedicated to displaying intriguing objects (not all of them authentic) from nature, art, archaeology and ethnography, very broadly defined. Grand or humble, each cabinet tried to capture the richness of the universe on a miniature scale.


  Bruce Chatwin’s grandparents maintained a cabinet of curiosities that was said to contain ‘a piece of brontosaurus’—actually part of a giant sloth, an inspiration for his wanderings in Patagonia. The striking and grotesque curiosities kept at the Bodleian included a mummy, an Irish skull, a Jamaican crocodile, Chinese books, the Tsar of Russia’s lambskin coat and a whale that had been caught in the River Severn.

  St Gall’s cabinet of curiosities contains the jaws of a shark, citrus fruits, coins, artefacts from East India (shoes, textiles and a basket) and the mummified remains of Schepenese, a young Egyptian princess from Thebes—believed to date from about 610 BC. A visitor to the library in 1962 noted that the ebony-skinned mummy had ‘such delicate features, as well as beautiful teeth’.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘What the Barbarians did not do’

  The Vatican Library

  English Grand Tourists visiting the Vatican were always shown Greek and Roman antiquities, a papyrus leaf, a breviary said to have belonged to St Gregory, more Chinese books and, pivotal to England’s break with the Roman church, prized documentary treasures such as the manuscript of Henry VIII’s Assertio septem sacramentorum, as well as adulterous love letters he sent to Anne Boleyn. Other treasures in the Vatican include a reliquary for the head of Saint Sebastian; the granite torso of Pharaoh Nectanebo I; the smiling Polynesian god Tu, sturdily built from wood; a reddish stone sculpture of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent; the Gabinetto Numismatico o Medagliere, which contains the world’s largest collection of papal and Roman coins; and figures in ivory, bronze, enamel, glass, terracotta and cloth, many of them taken from the Roman catacombs.