The Library

by Stuart Kells

  Writers’ libraries

  If libraries have auras, then those of writers’ libraries are the most pungent. Oscar Wilde’s extensive library housed fishing books, Gothic romances, éditions de luxe, periodicals, finely bound Greek and Latin classics, popular literature, more than 100 French novels, special copies of his own works, and multiple editions of Shakespeare, whom Wilde loved ‘as we should love all things, not wisely but too well’. The chaotic, punitive dispersal of Wilde’s library during his obscenity trials was for him the most distressing event in a life marred by tragedies. In prison, books were the first things he asked for. When he passed away in a cheap Parisian hotel, he was surrounded by his latest attempt to recreate his library.

  Leo Tolstoy also had strong feelings about Shakespeare, feelings he expressed with words like repulsion, tedium, bewilderment and evil. But Dickens was a favourite of Tolstoy’s and had pride of place in the Russian’s library-workroom. The American diplomat and historian George Kennan visited that room in 1886, describing it as ‘not much larger than an ordinary bedroom’. The walls were lined with bookshelves filled with books, mostly in paper covers.

  The floor was bare; the furniture, which was old-fashioned in form, consisted of two or three plain chairs, a deep sofa, or settle, upholstered with worn green morocco, and a small cheap table without a cloth… There was a marble bust in a niche behind the settle, but the only pictures which the room contained were a small engraved portrait of Dickens and another of Schopenhauer. It would be impossible to imagine anything plainer or simpler than the room and its contents. More evidences of wealth and luxury might be found in many a peasant’s cabin in Eastern Siberia.

  Only slightly less austere was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, ‘a large, square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant by pictures and sunshine’. The ‘homely shelves’ that lined the walls were well-stocked with books. A visitor noticed the lack of showy covers or rich bindings. Each volume seemed ‘to have soberly grown old in constant service’.

  Some writers’ books are pressed less gently into service. In 1763 James Boswell visited Samuel Johnson’s garret library—up four pairs of stairs in an attic of Johnson’s house in Gough Square. The attic window offered a view of St Paul’s Cathedral. Boswell found in the library ‘a number of good books, but very dusty and in great confusion. The floor was strewed with manuscript leaves, in Johnson’s own handwriting, which I beheld with a degree of veneration, supposing they perhaps might contain portions of The Rambler or of Rasselas’. On another visit, in April 1776, Boswell found Johnson putting his books in order, ‘and as they were generally very old ones, clouds of dust were flying around him’. He had on a large pair of gloves, such as hedgers and ditchers used. Clutching his folios and octavos, Johnson ‘banged and buffeted them together until he was enveloped in a cloud of dust’.

  This violent exercise over, the good doctor restored the volumes, all battered and bruised, to their places, where, of course, the dust resettled itself as speedily as possible.

  R. W. Ketton-Cremer described Johnson’s sixteenth-century copy of The Iliad as ‘a great folio as dingy and tattered in outward appearance as most of the books that passed through Johnson’s hands and suffered his drastic methods of dusting and buffeting’. During dinner, according to Boswell, Johnson kept a book wrapped in the tablecloth in his lap,

  from an avidity to have one entertainment in readiness, when he should have finished another; resembling (if I may use so coarse a simile) a dog who holds a bone in his paws in reserve, while he eats something else which has been thrown to him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Execration upon Vulcan

  Libraries destroyed by fire and war

  During the fall of Nineveh around 612 BC, fire destroyed the library of clay tablets formed by Sargon I, founder of the Semitic Empire in Chaldea. Other ancient book fires include the one that destroyed Rome’s Palatine Library in 80 AD; fires in Byzantium in 476 AD and, possibly, the fires that helped seal the fate of the Great Library of Alexandria. There was no shortage of book fires in the Middle Ages, either. A mediaeval chronicler penned an account of the burning of a church library: ‘An inexpressible number of books perished, leaving us deprived of our spiritual weapons.’

  The English poet and diplomat Matthew Prior fell asleep in the oak-beamed Wimborne Minster Library while reading Walter Raleigh’s History of the World with a candle. The book was damaged; afterwards a master scribe painstakingly saw to the injuries, reinstating the printed words with his pen. To prevent such incidents, Gabriel Naudé would not permit candles in his library, though he would allow a small stove to keep the air from becoming damp. Ben Jonson wrote the poem An Execration upon Vulcan about the books destroyed in his home when, after a night spent drinking, he retired to his paper-filled study and lit candles. John Stuart Mill’s maidservant accidentally burned a whole volume of the manuscript of Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution. No duplicate of the manuscript existed, so Carlyle had to rewrite it. Tennyson asked him how he felt. ‘I just felt,’ Carlyle said, ‘like a man swimming without water.’

  Apart from destroying many libraries, the 1666 Fire of London also obliterated bulk quantities of unsold books. Shakespeare’s 1663 Third Folio, for example, is rarer than his First Folio because many of the Third Folio copies were destroyed in the stock of booksellers. In 1671 at El Escorial in Spain a fire broke out amid the library’s 18,000 books and manuscripts while the monks were in church. In a heroic effort, the monks beat the flames back and threw the threatened volumes into the courtyard. Tragedy followed. The dry fabric of a captured Turkish banner caught alight, collapsing and setting it all on fire. About a third of the library’s holdings were destroyed, some of them unique. The library was restored but charred panels can still be seen at the Biblioteca Principal.

  On the night of 3 February 1731, fire broke out in the royal palace in Brussels. The books of the royal library, kept in a tower room, were hastily thrown out of the window; a thick folio reportedly killed an onlooker.

  *

  In England, between 1536 and 1539, the monastic orders, and all that belonged to them, were annihilated. As John Willis Clark wrote in his 1906 The Care of Books,

  Upwards of 800 monasteries were suppressed, and, as a consequence, 800 libraries were done away with, varying in size and importance from Christ Church, Canterbury, with its 2000 volumes, to small houses with little more than the necessary service-books. By the year 1540 the only libraries left in England were those at the two Universities, and in the Cathedrals of the old foundation. Further, the royal commissioners made no attempt to save any of the books with which the monasteries were filled…The buildings were pulled down, and the materials sold; the plate was melted; and the books were either burnt, or put to the vilest uses to which waste literature can be subjected.

  Those uses included tearing pages from manuscripts to wrap food, scour candlesticks and polish boots. The protestant John Bale lamented the terrible destruction and the books’ careless dispersal to grocers and bookbinders, and by the ship load to foreign nations. To destroy the libraries in such a manner ‘without consideration’ was a national disgrace; a horrible and ineradicable infamy.

  Upon the dissolution of German monasteries and religious institutions, the fruits of centuries of zealous collecting were carelessly disposed of or destroyed as ‘papist literature’. Many ecclesiastical libraries, such as the one at Reinhardsbrunn, met total destruction.

  The printer, author, philanthropist, landscape architect and Member of Parliament Thomas Johnes is best known for his development, late in the eighteenth century, of the Hafod Estate in Wales as an exemplary Picturesque landscape. Housed in a spacious, octagonal building, the estate’s library contained many prizes: Welsh, French and Latin manuscripts; rare books of natural history; rare editions of the French chronicles of the later Middle Ages; and valuable volumes purchased from the library of the Marquis de Pesaro.

  Thomas Johnes married Jane Johnes, his first
cousin. From Thomas Banks, Jane commissioned a sculpture for the library: a depiction of Thetis dipping Achilles in the river Styx. The Johneses’ baby daughter, Mariamne, provided the model for Achilles. On 13 March 1807, fire broke out in the mansion. Disastrously, the entire contents of the library were destroyed. Mercifully, though, Jane and Miriamne escaped. Thomas was in London attending Parliament when he heard the news.

  In 1904 a fire at the Turin University Library destroyed more than 100,000 books and manuscripts—about a third of the total collection—including twenty-one manuscripts from Bobbio, and an important collection of Oriental manuscripts. The fire, which destroyed five entire halls of the library, was blamed on an electrical fault. Fortunately, some of the Turin–Bobbio manuscripts had been photographed. In 1907 Carlo Cipolla published the photographs as Codici Bobbiesi in a limited edition of 175 copies.

  Another electrical fire was equally devastating. In September 2004 fire gutted Weimar’s eighteenth-century rococo library of Duchess Anna Amalia. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had once been a director there.) The fire destroyed over 50,000 volumes; the library has since been restored.

  In 1731 a fire at Ashburnham House on Little Dean’s Yard in Westminster caused mayhem for the old library of Sir Robert Cotton. Thirty years earlier, Cotton’s grandson had bequeathed the library to the British people. It was residing temporarily at Ashburnham under the care of the king’s librarian, Dr Bentley. The library of literary, ecclesiastical, legal and constitutional manuscripts was described by C. J. Wright of the British Library as ‘arguably the most important collection of manuscripts ever assembled in Britain by a private individual’. It contained some of Britain’s greatest treasures, including the sublime Lindisfarne Gospels (in which Eadfrith’s deliberate errors can be found); the original Magna Carta that Cotton allegedly discovered at his tailor’s shop; and ‘Cotton Vitellius A XV’, which contains the only extant manuscript of Beowulf.

  Many banded together to fight the fire, including Mr Speaker Onslow. They rescued hundreds of volumes by entering the building and throwing them from the windows. ‘Cotton Vitellius A XV’ was one of the manuscripts thrown on to the lawn.

  The fire affected about a quarter of the collection and a tenth of the manuscripts. Almost all the printed books were lost, along with thirteen entire manuscripts and parts of others; some of the ‘surviving’ manuscripts were reduced to fatty lumps or charred fragments, so the true extent of manuscript losses was far worse than these numbers suggest. The manuscript of Beowulf was singed around the edges, but fortunately remained intact.

  Apart from eliciting a parliamentary committee investigation, the fire was the subject of scuttlebutt in which the Ashburnham librarian Dr Bentley was himself accused of lighting the fire. Holbrook Jackson thought this unlikely, given Bentley’s conduct during the fire-fighting effort.

  The Headmaster of Westminster, speeding to the rescue, saw a figure issue from the burning house ‘in his dressing-gown, a flowing wig on his head, and a huge volume under his arm’: it was Bentley saving the Alexandrine manuscript of the New Testament.

  That manuscript, the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, was one of three of the earliest manuscripts of the Bible. The accusations seem even less plausible when it is noted that the losses included expensive Greek manuscripts, which Bentley had long been accumulating for his work on the Greek Testament.

  A massive conservation effort followed, with much hanging, drying, cleaning, flattening and reassembling of leaves—often with highly imperfect results. Some burned, congealed, fatty, lumpy and brittle fragments of vellum were no longer conservable. (One of the damaged manuscripts, left unconserved, looks like ‘an irradiated armadillo’.) Some volumes were put back together in the wrong order or with pages from elsewhere. Many single leaves and fragments, like scattered puzzle pieces, were put into drawers to await future reunions.

  Most of the library was retrieved. The surviving books and manuscripts are now a core part of the British Library. Much has been learned from the fire, about conservation and about fire management. The water used to extinguish the fire caused as much damage as the flames. Modern libraries have gone to great lengths to avoid that predicament. The Oxfordshire library of Paul Getty, for example, was fitted with a ‘sprinkler’ system containing halon gas that would extinguish a fire without recourse to water. The Beinecke Library also avoids the need for water: if the library’s smoke detectors are triggered, a fire-suppressing cocktail of halon and inergen gasses floods the glass-enclosed stacks.

  *

  Eighty years after the Ashburnham blaze, another controversial book fire burned, this time at Clontarf near Dublin. Frederick Cavendish owned an impressive house that featured an impressive library: a magnificent collection of rare editions in sumptuous bindings. After the death of his wife in 1812, Cavendish moved his family to Dublin and sought a tenant for the house at Clontarf. In advance of a visit by a prospective lessee, Cavendish lit fires in the house to ‘air’ it and to protect the books from damp. In an essay for the Book Collector, Tim Munby and Mary Pollard describe how Cavendish spread some of the volumes out on the floor and on a large couch, ‘so they should get the maximum benefit from the heat of the fire in the grate’.

  At about seven-thirty [in the evening] Cavendish, who was pacing the lawn in front of the house, was horrified to see smoke pouring from the library windows. He gave the alarm and the neighbours swiftly came to his help, augmented by a number of casual labourers who were in the area for the harvest.

  When finally the fire was extinguished, the library was a scene of devastation. Two hundred of the most valuable volumes had been destroyed. Or had they? Did Cavendish ever actually own those books, or did he simply fabricate the catalogue of his library, using other sources such as sale catalogues?

  When Cavendish called on his insurers to make good his losses, they refused and the matter went to court. There, Cavendish claimed the fire had consumed utterly the lost books—bindings and all. Yet the court heard evidence that the fire was ‘relatively small’, not intense enough to obliterate large numbers of whole books, and that it caused ‘comparatively little damage to the fabric of the house’. Some burned book fragments were left behind, but those, suspiciously, were only of old magazines and reference works—volumes of little value compared to the Caxtons and Aldines that were purportedly lost.

  Equally incriminating was evidence that parts of the listing of Cavendish’s holdings seemed to have been lifted from a recent auction catalogue. After a flawed trial in which the jury heard inadmissible evidence and the judge allowed the jury to reach a verdict without hearing his juridical summary or the final remarks of counsel, the insurers won. Cavendish had good reason to think that verdict unfair. The auction catalogue, for example, was not so incriminating after all: several of Cavendish’s books had come from that sale, so copying the catalogue would be sensible and innocent. He appealed the judgment, but the new jury again found in the insurers’ favour.

  As Andrew Madden, Joe Palimi and Jared Bryson noted in their 2006 paper on the history of literacy, the burning of books has become a symbol of barbarism; people are upset even by routine textual destructions. In 1992 Tim Cullen was appointed librarian at the Natural Resources Institute in Kent.

  Within weeks of his appointment, skips were hired and were soon filled with books and papers. Tim Cullen… still recalls with frustration, the outcry that ensued. Those documents, some of his critics argued, went back decades and were part of the Institute’s long tradition. Tim Cullen’s response was to point out that the documents hadn’t been looked at for decades, no one had wanted them when he had offered them around, and he needed to make space for texts that would be looked at.

  To the protesters, published texts, no matter how humble or tired or peripheral, still possessed an inviolable potency. They were, as Henry Petroski put it, the basic data of our civilisation.

  Carrying such enormous cultural and emotional power, the burning of books has become a l
iterary stereotype. Books are burned in Don Quixote, Titus Groan, Anne of Green Gables, Fahrenheit 451, Iain Pears’s The Dream of Scipio, and all the Pepe Carvalho detective novels of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. In Paul Auster’s 1987 apocalyptic novel, In the Country of Last Things, the narrator takes refuge in the national library, whose books—mostly sentimental novels, collections of political speeches and obsolete textbooks—are now worthless. ‘The world they had belonged to was finished.’ During a severe winter, the books feed the fire: ‘everything made its way into the stove, everything went up in smoke.’

  Winston Smith, the hero of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, lives in a world in which books are routinely hunted down and destroyed; in all of Oceania, books printed before 1960 no longer exist. Smith’s task is to update the archives based ‘on the needs of the moment’. Books are continuously rewritten, with no trace or admission that a previous version ever existed. History, in Smith’s world, is ‘a palimpsest’, to be scrubbed and rewritten at will.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel The Shadow of the Wind explores themes of book destruction and protection. It pivots on the labyrinthine ‘cemetery of lost books’ from which Daniel Sempere must select, then guard with his life, a book. In picturing the book hoard, Zafón took inspiration from real and imaginary precedents: galleries of mirrors; stories within stories; the multilevel bookshop of Francis Edwards; the multi-room bookshop of Wilfrid Voynich, said to have been organised in a deliberate sequence of crammed spaces so as to enhance the sense of drama and discovery; the marvellous abbey library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose; and the epic, tragic dépôts littéraires of revolutionary France.

  Apart from an intolerable human cost, wars and revolutions have levied a terrible toll on cultural heritage. Along with other cultural artefacts, books are, as William Ewart Gladstone put it, ‘the bonds and rivets of the race’—and there is no better way to destroy a culture than to destroy its books. Throughout the history of libraries, the wholesale destruction and plunder of books has been an appalling constant.