by Stuart Kells
Jonathan Swift remarked, ‘I have sometimes heard of an Iliad in a nutshell, but it has been my fortune to have much oftener seen a nutshell in an Iliad.’ A visitor to the Folger Shakespeare Library left behind, on a marble bench, a set of false teeth. He returned the next day to collect them, telling the library staff that he was grinding his teeth and had removed them to rest his gums.
From 1875 to 1884, Richard Garnett was superintendent of the British Museum reading room. He recalled how a lady asked for a particular cookbook, which she was told in a dream she would find in the library. The lady was able to describe the book in some detail. It contained a recipe for curing ham, plus a plate illustrating the carving of various dishes. Happily, Garnett was able to report that a book answering to the description was found.
CHAPTER 8
Keepers of Books
The best and worst librarians in history
The Librarian (c. 1566), by the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, is an anthropomorphic portrait of a librarian—a portrait composed of books. A court artist for the Habsburg emperors Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, Arcimboldo mastered ‘composite portraits’, the illusionistic art of turning objects into images. This image of a librarian is not just a generic parody; much more is going on. The librarian’s ‘arms’ and ‘fingers’ of vellum and silk clutch greedily a stack of books. To the extent that a painted pile of strategically organised books can convey human character, the ‘librarian’ is acquisitive, haughty, careful about his appearance, and somewhat ridiculous. The picture, it seems, is a critique.
Anthony Hobson read the portrait as a satire of the ‘massive erudition’ of the day, while library scholar K. C. Elhard saw in the painting a polemic against ‘poor bookmanship’—yet another attack on ‘materialist book collectors’ who are more interested in acquiring books than in reading them. But Swedish art critic Sven Alfons was the first to identify the painting’s target as an individual: the Austrian polymath Wolfgang Lazius, official historian to Ferdinand I in Vienna’s Habsburg court from around 1550 to 1565. Lazius was accused of acquiring records by whatever means possible, including theft. He was also accused of producing self-aggrandising and inaccurate scholarship. The seemingly innocuous painting is a brutal take-down of Lazius and his methods.
Evolving and solidifying gradually, the practices and conventions of librarianship differed markedly across institutions. The Bodleian Library statutes required the librarian to be a university graduate, ‘and a Linguist, not encombred with mariage’, because ‘mariage is too full of domestical impeachements’. Thomas James, Oxford librarian from 1600 to 1620, threatened to resign unless the celibacy obligation was relaxed; Bodley reluctantly relented. At the Colombina in Seville, the librarian had to be a graduate of Salamanca. His room contained basic necessities—a simple bed, sheets, a blanket, an armchair, a bench and a book cupboard. Monthly visits, from ‘a learned person’, were instigated to keep him in check, and he would be fined in the case of non-attendance. There was one important perk. Every sixth year, the Colombina librarian was sent all over Italy to hunt for acquisitions.
At the British Museum, James Cates was the first clerk of the reading room. Though Cates was said to resemble a remarkably neat old-style clergyman, in his youth he’d been a champion boxer. Created in 1857, the post of superintendent of the museum’s reading room was ideally filled by a man who possessed great stamina, combining the skills of a gentleman, a scholar and a police officer. The staff needed to know how to handle themselves, such as when a senior academic invited a deputy superintendent to ‘step outside’ the reading room. When asked why, the academic responded: ‘In order that I may punch you in the eye, and so relieve my feelings about the inefficiency of this library.’
Some library staff have laboured in even worse conditions. During the Renaissance, library assistants at the Vatican worked in the cold, half naked. Despite such challenges, librarians have achieved great feats of commitment to the cause of bibliography. In the seventeenth century Adrien Baillet was librarian to François Chrétien de Lamoignon, a magistrate, book collector and Avocat Général of the Parlement of Paris. According to Holbrook Jackson, Baillet had no life outside of books. He slept no longer than five hours a night, abstained from wine, ate only once a day and soon became so riddled with ulcers and an ‘erysipelatous affection’, he was hideous to look at. When he died, only fifty-seven years old, he was considered a librarian of ‘unparalleled diligence and sagacity’.
In the fifteenth century Frederick of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, laid down principles and guidance for the perfect librarian, who must be ‘learned, of good appearance, good natured’. Not all librarians followed the duke’s precepts. Eighteenth-century German librarians were notoriously obnoxious. According to the German traveller and bibliophile Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, who wrote at the start of that century, the staff of Germany’s public libraries were ‘ignorant, discourteous, envious and lazy’. Nearly 100 years later, things hadn’t improved. The author and historian Friedrich Hirsching contributed to the rich late-eighteenth-century library travel literature. He called the same libraries’ directors ‘arrogant misanthropes who look upon their positions as sinecures’. Difficult librarians were an international problem. In a letter to Sir Thomas Phillipps, Sir Frederick Madden of the British Museum described the Escorial library in 1855: ‘40 miles from Madrid…An ignorant monk is the librarian.’ Madden himself was known as a famous curmudgeon; Tim Munby called him ‘probably the ablest, and certainly the most disagreeable, Keeper of the Department of Manuscripts’.
Not all librarians were ignorant or misanthropic. When, in July 1575, the Dutch Calvinist Hugo Blotz was put in charge of an illustrious imperial library, the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, he was shocked by what he saw. Everything in the library, which dated from mediaeval times, looked ‘neglected and desolate’.
There was mouldiness and rot everywhere, the débris of moths and bookworms, and a thick covering of cobwebs. …The windows had not been opened for months and not a ray of sunshine had penetrated through them to brighten the unfortunate books, which were slowly pining away; and when they were opened, what a cloud of noxious air streamed out!
The library was situated on the first floor of the Minorites’ monastery, a location that was inherently unsuitable. No air could circulate—because three of the four external walls lacked windows. The building sat directly above the monastery’s well; damp seeped implacably into the floors and walls. The internal layout, too, was awful. Visitors had to pass through a corn store and the monks’ dormitory to reach the library. When intrepid visitors finally reached their destination, there was no space available for them to consult the books.
Even requesting books to view was well-nigh impossible. The collection ‘had become so disorganised that the existing index was useless’. Blotz had to do something. He pressganged whomever he could into the task of restoring order. Helped intermittently by his friends Guett, Pudler and Tanner, and by Pudler’s son and Tanner’s sons’ tutor, he set about arranging the 7379 volumes and preparing a catalogue. By April 1576, a summary was ready. Blotz kept one copy and sent the other to Emperor Maximilian II in Prague. With the emperor’s blessing, Blotz changed the library’s policies and configuration. He began lending books, and he increased the collection by negotiating purchases and bequests. ‘From these uncertain beginnings the library progressed, gathering rarities and reputation.’ Blotz left behind several invaluable legacies. One of these was his influence on the planning of a new library building to replace the rabbit warren he inherited. Another was his influence on a French librarian.
In the seventeenth century Gabriel Naudé was the beau ideal of library directors. For Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister to the King of France, Naudé assembled a library that he himself called the eighth wonder of the world. Naudé thought the essence of library formation was to collect ‘all the chief and principal Authors, as well ancient as modern’. And then to classify and catalogue them:
an unclassified collection deserved the name ‘library’ as little as a crowd of men deserved to be called an army. Thorough in his acquisitions, he once bought for Cardinal Mazarin the entire stock of a bookseller. On another buying trip, he passed through a town and left it ‘as bare of printed paper as if a tornado had passed, and blown the leaves away’. Naudé also recommended sending rich merchants to scour foreign bookshops for treasures and novelties.
As a result of Naudé’s work between 1642 and 1651, the Mazarin Library was a wondrous achievement: 40,000 meritorious volumes, beautifully bound in goatskin decorated in gilt with the Mazarin arms. Books old and new, rare and common, orthodox and heretical. In early 1652, however, tragedy struck. During a civil war, thousands of the books were stolen and burned. The librarian cried in anguish, ‘for he loved his handiwork as a father loves his only child’. After recovering many of the lost books, Naudé died in 1653.
Naudé’s influence as a bibliographical thinker was enormous. Samuel Pepys’s immaculate collection of books included a dedication copy of John Evelyn’s 1665 translation of Naudé’s 1627 treatise, Avis pour dresser une bibliothèque, which ‘set out a program for a universal library, provided with the most important books in all branches of knowledge in their original languages and in translation’.
Blotz and Naudé influenced in their turn another leading figure in the European Enlightenment. In his Plan for a Public Library that is to be Ordered According to the Classification of the Sciences, and also his More Limited Plan for an Ordered Library, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz set down principles for good librarianship. Christian Thomasius called Leibniz a living library. Leibniz sponsored Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, architect of the new Hofbibliothek, the largest rococo library ever built and the most imposing library hall of its time. Becoming librarian to the Duke of Brunswick—whose fabulous Wolfenbüttel library he transferred to a building with a glass roof but no heating—Leibniz was also mooted as a future Vatican librarian. That prestigious post was closed to him when he refused to adopt the tenets of Roman Catholicism.
The legacy of Naudé and Leibniz and their progressive ideas of the scholarly library were taken up by the first curator of the State and University Library in Göttingen. The library was founded as a unit of the Georg-August University in 1734. Its founder and first curator was Gerlach Adolph Freiherr von Münchhausen, the cousin of Hieronymus ‘Baron’ von Münchhausen. Appointed by George II (who was both king of Great Britain and elector of Hanover), Gerlach was an exemplary steward of the library. He appointed outstanding scholars; he sourced books from local and foreign booksellers; he consulted the university’s professors on acquisition priorities; he raised funds deftly, including by attracting large bequests; he gave due weight to every major branch of knowledge; he supported scholarly publications and in every respect he put into practice Leibniz and Naudé’s principles of librarianship.
Under Münchhausen’s leadership, and that of the librarian and neo-humanist philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne, the library grew from 60,000 to more than 200,000 scientifically catalogued volumes. Foundational acquisitions came from Count Joachim Heinrich von Bülow (2000 maps and 8952 volumes, forty of which were manuscripts), the Royal Library of Hanover (2154 volumes) and the Gymnasium Library of Göttingen (708 volumes). Feeding the minds of Goethe, Herder, Heine, Humboldt and Schopenhauer, the library became one of the most important and influential in Western Europe; ‘the first realisation of the modern idea of a research library’.
Naudé, Leibniz and Münchhausen were responsible for a key trend in the Enlightenment: the emergence of scientific bibliography and scientific librarians. They were the role models for the greatest librarian of the modern era, ‘the Napoleon of librarians’, the ‘second founder’ of the British Museum: Sir Anthony Panizzi. Panizzi enhanced every major aspect of contemporary library management—access policies, accession policies, cataloguing, funding, and especially architecture. Panizzi broke away from the dominant ‘hall with gallery’ style of library and instead created separate spaces for shelving books and for reading them. He personally planned the British Museum’s iconic reading room, which was formally opened, with a champagne breakfast, in 1857. The room’s dome fell just short of the Pantheon, and set a new international benchmark for library design and the design of all public spaces.
Vandals
Some people should never be allowed near books. In addition to a neat collection of leather-bound books, Pablo Manguel maintained a secondary collection of paperbacks that yellowed and withered on a wicker patio table, and which his son Alberto would sometimes rescue and take into his room, ‘as if they were stray cats’. The publisher and bookman Nicolas Barker kept a library of paperbacks—mostly Penguins—in the lavatory of his West London home.
Sir Edward Burne-Jones argued books were of no use to a painter, save to prop up models in difficult positions. Théophile Gautier used his folio edition of Plutarch as a press for crumpled engravings, and to put under children so they could sit at the table. When Coventry Patmore was a boy, he took from a shelf a thick old Bible so he could sit more conveniently at dinner, earning from his father a memorably stern rebuke.
Tim Munby maintained a private collection of sturdy but imperfect books that he called his ‘cripples’: a Second Folio Shakespeare, first-edition novels lacking leaves or original bindings, and other volumes, equally diminished. Apart from being a great source of pleasure, the impaired books were more practical than pristine copies and sought-after editions: ‘they can be lent to friends, put in one’s pocket and taken up the river; and if they fell into the water it would not be the end of the world.’
Passionate about making and sailing paper boats, the poet Shelley could not resist turning fly leaves—along with letters, newspapers and banknotes—into little ships.
In Anatomy of Bibliomania, Holbrook Jackson called out three bibliomaniacs who indulged in a particular species of biblio-abuse: Edward FitzGerald, who regularly cut from his books the sections that gave him no pleasure, retaining only those which were to his taste; Voltaire, who ‘made such abridgements of celebrated authors, preserving only what he thought good, and frequently reducing several volumes to one’; and the Parisian collector ‘who tore out so many offending pages that his library contained only one complete volume’; the other volumes ‘were composed of fragments and remnants magnificently bound’.
Dr Hughlings Jackson, the pioneer neurologist, is a starring figure in Holbrook Jackson’s essay ‘How Not to Care for Books’. The doctor owned a unique library of mutilated volumes. Never hesitating to tear a book apart, he frequently sent the torn pages to friends he thought might be interested in the subject matter. Whenever he purchased a novel at a railway bookstall, he would tear off the covers, then rip the book in two, each half going into a pocket. Observing one such sacrilegious performance, the clerk at the stall looked on in shock, causing Jackson to remark: ‘You think I am mad, my boy, but it’s people who don’t do this who are really mad.’
Charles Darwin adopted the same practical and utterly unsentimental approach to books. When they fell to pieces through rough use, he held them together with metal clips. To make cumbersome books easier to hold, he cut them in half, and was also known to tear out pages of a book, leaving only what interested him, in order to save space. Darwin wrote so many notes in his books that we can now read along with him.
Becky Sharp and Napoleon Bonaparte are two notorious abusers of books, both well known for throwing books from the windows of fast-moving horse-drawn carriages. In the autumn of 1949, one of the rarest and most valuable books in America—the Weatherup–Rosenbach copy of the Bay Psalm Book—was defenestrated from a stationary window. Part of a loan exhibition at the UCLA Library, the 1640 book was snatched from its case by a student, reportedly as part of a fraternity initiation prank. The student then leaped from a second-floor window; the book, but not the student, was recovered unharmed.
In 1962 Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes shared a tha
tch-roofed house with their two young children. Unhappy with Hughes’s actual or apparent adultery—perhaps with Assia Wevill or, less plausibly, Moira Doolan—Plath made a bonfire in the backyard. She burned more than a thousand pages of Hughes’s manuscripts, letters and other valuable papers—all his correspondence, his work in hand, his drafts, his notebooks. According to Al Alvarez, Plath mixed Hughes’s manuscripts with his dandruff flakes and fingernail trimmings, before consigning them to the fire. Plath also ‘gralloched’ Hughes’s collected edition of Shakespeare: ‘Only the hard spine and the end boards had stood up to the onslaught. The text had been more or less reduced to fluff.’ Hughes managed to salvage a few scraps of his own papers and stuck them back together with Scotch tape.
CHAPTER 9
The Quintessence of Debauchery
Heber, Byron and Barry
The first English book auction of modern times was held in 1676, for the library of the clergyman Lazarus Seaman. There had been Continental auctions before then, most notably in France and the Netherlands. Librarians and collectors have long prized the records of these and subsequent auctions as public evidence of the contents of private libraries. Auction catalogues help trace the movement of books between collections. In so doing, they capture the pulse of accumulation and dispersal, a pulse ardently measured and lived by bibliophiles.
No man was ever more in tune with that pulse than Isaac Gosset, Bibliographer, Doctor of Divinity, Fellow of the Royal Society. For over thirty years during the reign of George III—a golden era for book-lovers—Gosset was a familiar figure in London’s auction rooms, where he often sat to the right of the auctioneer, giving a running commentary on each lot as it was presented. His constant use of the phrase ‘a pretty copy’ caused much amusement. He kept and bound copies of the sale catalogues; eventually his collection of these would number at least three hundred. Reliably he appeared clad in the attire of an earlier generation—exemplified by his three-cornered hat. When a print-seller, aggrieved by some unknown offence, commissioned a satirical print that caricatured Gosset’s garb, the bibliophile changed his headgear, but this was met with a second print that showed him in the new outfit.
