by Stuart Kells
Consider, for example, the Macedonian royal library, looted by the Roman consul Emilius Paulus in 168 BC. Or the Roman libraries, sacked by the Goths under their king Alaric. (According to Boethius, Fergus II—the first king of the Scots—served as a Goth commander in the sacking of Rome in 410 AD and brought away a plunder of manuscripts, which he presented to the monastery at Iona.) Or the illuminated manuscripts, stolen—probably for the gold in the bindings—by the Danes and Vikings who raided monasteries in Saxon England, including Lindisfarne in the ninth century. Or Korea’s Tripitaka library of Buddhist scriptural printing blocks, destroyed by fire in 1232 during a Mongol invasion. (Later, Portuguese Christians also wreaked havoc in the libraries of Buddhist Ceylon.)
In 1298 the English king Edward I defeated the Scottish knight Sir William Wallace, a leader of the rebellion against Edward I during the Wars of Scottish Independence. Edward did all in his power to extirpate the Scots; he burned their registers and the great Restennoth Library that housed the books that Fergus II had brought back as plunder from Rome. In August 1305 Wallace was captured near Glasgow. Handed over to Edward, he was hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason.
The register of book plunder seems never-ending. An illuminated French Bible was stolen from the tent of the king of France during the Battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356. In 1424–25 the Duke of Bedford relieved the Louvre library of 843 manuscripts. In 1526 the Turks largely destroyed the fine library of Matthias Corvinus in Buda. And in 1632 Gustavus Adolphus’s Swedes looted the picture books in Albrecht’s Kunstkammer, on the ground floor of the Antiquarium at the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
In pre-Columbian America, the Conquistadors burned Mayan books; as few as three genuine Mayan codices survive today, and as few as fourteen Aztec ones—the other Aztec books were despatched by the Inquisition. Further north, in August 1814, the invading British set fire to the US Capitol and the 3000 books of its new Library of Congress, which only a short time before had acquired 740 books in London. (That century there would be two more Library of Congress fires, in 1825 and 1851.)
On 14 July 1789, a mob swarmed from the Bastille to the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris. The mob’s intention was clear: to sack the residence of the Count of Artois, the unpopular younger brother of Louis XVI. The superb library, though, was saved through the quick action of Claude Marin Saugrain. Formerly a bookseller, then keeper of the Arsenal’s library—some 100,000 carefully selected works, largely by French writers and especially poets—Saugrain made the porter change into the king’s livery, ‘thus persuading the crowd that it had called at the wrong address’.
The story was much worse for the Royal Library. In the first heat of the revolution, Anne-Louis-François de Paule Lefèvre d’Ormesson de Noyseau, the last royal librarian, was arrested, as were his successors Jean-Louis Carra and Sébastien Chamfort. Carra died under the guillotine in 1793, Lefèvre d’Ormesson in 1794. After a stint in a filthy prison, Chamfort attempted suicide, dying months later from improper treatment of his wounds.
The Reign of Terror supplied a horrific new material for book-making. Books covered with the skin of executed prisoners were said to be bound in ‘aristocratic leather’. (A volume at Harvard University’s Houghton Library—Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame—is bound in the skin of an eighteenth-century ‘mental patient’.) Collectors and connoisseurs of such items procured ever more sickening examples, prizing specimens with every kind of human protuberance on the front cover.
The contents of the Royal Library, too, were in mortal danger. In the minds of the revolutionaries, its books had been defiled by the name ‘Bibliothèque du Roi’. There was much enthusiasm for burning the whole collection. A less drastic proposal was drafted as a decree:
the books of the Public Libraries of Paris, and of the Departments, could no longer be permitted to offend the eyes of the Republicans by shameful marks of servitude, and that all such must be immediately effaced: Fleurs-de-lis, for example, and armorial bearings, whether on the bindings, or in other parts of books, together with all prefaces and dedications addressed to kings and nobles must disappear.
Two booksellers and a printer led a newspaper campaign that ensured the proposal was dropped. Many other books, though, were condemned—along with their owners—on account of their fine bindings.
Author and poet Andrew Lang described the dangers of broadcasting aristocratic sympathies through a predilection for well-bound books.
Condorcet might have escaped the scaffold if he had only thrown away the neat little Horace from the royal press, which betrayed him for no true Republican, but an educated man. The great libraries from the chateaux of the nobles were scattered among all the bookstalls. True sons of freedom tore off the bindings, with their gilded crests and scutcheons. One revolutionary writer declared, and perhaps he was not far wrong, that the art of binding was the worst enemy of reading. He always began his studies by breaking the backs of the volumes he was about to attack. The art of bookbinding in these sad years took flight to England, and was kept alive by artists robust rather than refined, like Thompson and Roger Payne. These were evil days, when the binder had to cut the aristocratic coat of arms out of a book cover, and glue in a gilt cap of liberty, as in a volume in an Oxford amateur’s collection.
In the two decades after the fall of the Bastille, nearly every book in France changed hands. The law of legal deposit was abolished, then re-established. In Paris, millions of volumes were confiscated from émigrés, churches, prisoners and other perceived enemies of the state. The confiscated volumes were assembled in eight vast, temporary storehouses—the dépôts littéraires. Other French cities such as Dijon and Lyon also set up book depots. In the storehouses, the jewels of France’s libraries mouldered in verminous dust and humidity.
The authorities arranged book sales to help empty the storages. At one Paris sale, the bookseller and publisher Jacques-Simon Merlin bought so many books that they filled the two five-storey houses he had bought for exactly this purpose. Though many of them were precious and rare, the books were priced by weight—the same as on Corfu. Even at that price, most French bibliophiles couldn’t afford to buy. Relatively cashed-up purchasers from England and Germany made a killing. The books that escaped destruction and weren’t sold abroad were eventually distributed among France’s public libraries, but conditions there were little better. As Alberto Manguel wrote in A History of Reading,
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the hours of access to these bibliothèques publiques were restricted, a dress code was enforced, and the precious books once again gathered dust on the shelves, forgotten and unread.
In Madrid, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, communists and anarchists executed the director of the Escorial library, P. Julián Zarco Cuevas, along with his predecessor, P. Melchor Martínez Antuña, and the monks who’d taken refuge in the library. A precursor to World War II, the Spanish Civil War foreshadowed on a national scale the cultural damage that would be wrought on a global one.
The collage of destruction in World War II included the firebombing of Holland House, London, and its wonderful book collection; damage to Ashburnham Place, Sussex, when a fully loaded Marauder bomber crashed nearby; severe damage to Milan’s Ambrosian Library in an Allied air-raid (the manuscripts and incunabula had been removed as a precaution and they escaped intact, but 50,000 other volumes, along with Cardinal Federigo’s original library room, were destroyed); the bombing, on four occasions, of the Bavarian State Library, which lost a devastating 500,000 volumes, many of them Bibles; the destruction of the buildings and the collection of Leipzig’s University in 1943; attacks by German bombers on Slovenian libraries in 1944; a Liberator bomber’s total destruction of Verona’s Biblioteca Capitolare (when the Capitolare reopened in 1948, the stoic librarian, Turrini, declared the new building to be more spacious and much more beautiful than the old one); and Japanese bombing at Rabaul in New Guinea, followed by
a ground invasion that destroyed the town’s library. Gordon Thomas, editor of the Rabaul Times, ‘had the sad experience of watching the library’s entire bookstock being thrown on a huge bonfire that burnt for days’.
The typographer Stanley Morison designed many famous fonts, including Times Roman. In December 1941, he wrote from the London Times offices to the American bookman Daniel Berkeley Updike about the night of 10 May 1941. Morison had lost many valuable books on that night, including Cabrol and Leclercq’s Dictionnaire. The British Museum was also hit. Liturgical books bore the brunt of the destruction. After inspecting the damage, Morison wrote despairingly that it was nothing short of disastrous. ‘I simply do not know where to turn for copies of certain books.’
After the Anschluss, the monks of the abbey library at Admont were expelled as enemies of the state, their property forfeited to the Reich. Manuscripts and incunabula were sent to Graz. In what Anthony Hobson called one of the most bizarre and sinister whims of Nazi rule, 3000 medical and botanical works were sent to the concentration camp at Dachau.
*
In some respects, the ancient Gothic invaders were more civilised than modern combatants. In 267 AD the Goths penetrated the Aegean Sea and sacked Athens. But, as Raymond Irwin noted in the Encyclopaedia of Librarianship, the marauders regarded one class of building as off limits: ‘they were restrained from setting fire to the libraries by the thought that good scholars made poor soldiers.’ The Gothic invaders were possibly in awe of it, and perhaps did not ‘want to lift a finger at something which seemed utterly mysterious and therefore divine’.
Not all Goths showed the same civility. The Catholic church has a long memory when it comes to reinstating books stolen from its libraries. In 1461–63 the papal legate Marino de Fregeno travelled through Scandinavia laying claim to books that had been looted by the Goths during the sack of Rome in 510.
In May 1527 the mutinous imperial army of Lutheran landsknechts also sacked Rome. Ninety-five years later, a catholic army marched into the Palatinate ‘to punish its Calvinist Elector’. The nuncio in Cologne made known in Germany the Pope’s willingness to accept an offer of the famous public library of Heidelberg, which was rich in ancient manuscripts from the abbey of Lorsch. Within five days of the town’s capture, Maximilian of Bavaria granted the Pope’s wish. More than 3000 manuscripts and 5000 books were taken to Rome. The Palatina’s shelves were cut up into packing-cases. Any remaining books were picked through by Bavarian soldiers.
Two centuries later, ‘consciences were still troubled’ by this acquisition. In 1815–16, Pius VII returned to the Duchy of Baden 842 German manuscripts and forty-two Latin ones.
Under Napoleon, books from the greatest libraries of western Europe started to reach the Bibliothèque Nationale as ‘cultural trophies’ from the conquered territories. Four decades later, most of the flood of accessions remained unarranged, uncatalogued and—in many cases—unreturned. It wasn’t until Léopold Delisle’s administration, beginning in 1874, that the backlog was finally addressed. Napoleon had ordered that the Vatican’s secret archive of papal documents be removed to Paris. It was returned, minus some key documents, after Waterloo.
The Bavarian State Library has taken pains to restitute any of its holdings that were improperly acquired or that had problematic provenance. The mediaeval Plock Pontifical, for example, was returned to Poland in April 2015. The Nazis had stolen that book from the Plock Bishopric in 1940 and placed it in the Königsberg university library. (The Bavarian State Library bought the manuscript in 1973 for 6200 deutsche marks at an auction in Munich.) The library identified a further 500 books ‘whose acquisition is to be regarded as unlawful’. Among the restitutions already completed, the library returned to the Thomas Mann Archive in Zurich seventy-eight volumes originating from Mann’s research library. The expelled Benedictines went back to Admont at the end of World War II; by 1955 most of the library’s books had been restored to their shelves.
During his 1990 pastoral visit to Mexico, Pope John Paul II offered a gift to the Mexican people: the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, an early Latin version of a rare medical manuscript that had been taken from New Spain in the sixteenth century. Martín de la Cruz, an Aztec physician, wrote the original manuscript in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, at the College of Santa Cruz in the new colony. Ultra-protective of the Holy See’s collections, the Vatican Librarian Leonard Boyle opposed the Pope’s offer of the book. Moreover, he made a failed attempt to prevent the offer’s fulfilment, remonstrating with John Paul II that the Vatican Library was the pontifical library and did not belong to a single pope. Later, a scandal erupted over Boyle’s fundraising activities; the gossip at the Vatican, repeated by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New Yorker, was that Boyle ‘found himself without crucial support in the Curia’.
The librarians at St Gall maintain a sorry listing—the Codices dispersi Sangallenses—of early manuscripts that were once in the abbey but are now held in other collections. The full list of losses also includes priceless early maps and rare prints. In 1996 lengthy negotiations began, with a view to the return of the manuscripts and other treasures taken from St Gall during the Toggenburg War of 1712. The negotiations were difficult; many of the international treaties governing the theft of cultural heritage in war (such as the Hague Conventions of 1907, on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, and 1954, for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict) did not apply to the sectarian battle of Vilmegen. The Central Library in Zurich, the Canton and City of Zurich, the Canton of St Gall, and the state’s Catholic administration failed to reach an agreement until the Swiss Federal Council intervened and secured a compromise. (The Swiss Constitution empowered the Confederation to ‘support cultural activities of national interest’.)
The main argument for restitution was that the appropriated items were part of an ensemble. Under the settlement agreement, St Gall accepted Zurich’s ownership of the cultural objects that the National Museum and the Central Library in Zurich had possessed since the end of the war. A total of about 100 St Gall codices are now housed in Zurich’s Central Library. The quid pro quo was that Zurich would recognise that these objects were integral to St Gall’s cultural identity and, more importantly, would give some of them back. In September 2006 Zurich returned forty precious and exemplary works executed by the monks of St Gall. Formally, they are ‘on loan’ for an indefinite period, without rent or interest.
Zurich also agreed to lend the original Cosmographical Globe to St Gall, for a four-month exhibition, and to commission, pay for and donate to St Gall an exact and expensive replica. The replica globe arrived at the Abbey Library in August 2009; the original is kept at the Swiss National Museum. The loan agreement can only be amended or terminated after thirty-eight years, ‘by a joint request from the highest executive of each party’. Another requirement of the settlement was that the Canton of St Gall digitise the loaned manuscripts and make them available on the internet. Hold-outs on both sides have criticised the agreement. Some in Zurich deny the Cosmographical Globe was ever taken; some at St Gall are not satisfied with the facsimile version, arguing that the original belonged to St Gall all along and that the abbey library was the best place for its permanent exhibition. Which part of ‘ensemble’ did the burghers of Zurich not understand?
Fundamentally, though, the dispute is over. In April 2006, to mark the dispute’s end, the Canton of Zurich presented the abbey library with the first biography of St Gallus, the so-called Vita vetustissima sancti Galli, written over the century from 680. The manuscript, kept for many years in the Zurich State Archives, is the oldest originating from St Gall. It exists only in fragments.
Despite its many past vicissitudes, St Gall’s library remains rich in herbals, breviaries, evangialiaries, antiphonaries, psalters, missals, graduals, hymnals, processionals, pontificals, decrees, edicts, satires, allegories, epics, festschrifts, palimpsests, calendars and lexicons. Volumes decorated in gold, silver and ivory. Volum
es representing the height of book craft and scholarship in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Now a UNESCO world cultural heritage site, the library holds more than 400 manuscript volumes produced before the year 1000; one of the largest collections of early manuscripts in the world.
The treasures that made it through include the oldest German book; beautiful examples of mediaeval manuscript art; botanical books; heraldry; cartography; medicine (one book recommends, as cure for the pain of toothache, pouring camomile into the patient’s ear); important musical manuscripts, including a parchment copy of the ‘Song of the Nibelungs’ and Johannes Heer’s ‘songbook’ (dating from his student days late in the fifteenth century, this is a collection of bawdy songs and erotic couplets); and an illustrated Biblia Pauperum, which, like a graphic novel, made the stories of the Bible accessible to semi-literate and illiterate audiences.
The library continues to be known for its manuscripts, such as works by Horace, Lucan, Sallust, Ovid and Cicero, and the surviving eleven pages and eight fragments of the Vergilius Sangallensis, a fifth-century volume that was originally written in the first century BC by Publius Vergilius Maro and that contained the Aeneid, Georgics and Bucolics. The library is also famous for the rococo library hall made by Thumb, Loser and the Giggels—visitors must wear special shoe-covering slippers to protect the beautiful, creaking pinewood floor—and for the mummy Schepenese and her beautiful teeth.
Library fauna
Public libraries are as effective as cheap hotels at spreading bed bugs (Cimex lectularius). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control consider these creatures a public health pest; civil authorities have employed bed-bug sniffer dogs to inspect infested libraries.
