The Library

by Stuart Kells

  When Emily Folger passed away, she left behind at the Folger Library a devoted staff that included a dirt-hating, workaholic maid, and Charles Rogers, the nightwatch engineer who had helped dig the Panama Canal. Rogers arrived at the library each day at four in the afternoon, resembling a dapper US Senator who would not be seen without a scarf and gloves.

  The collections were notionally open and accessible, but in many respects the library was not very welcoming. Guards stood at the front door. The catalogue was incomplete. The lights in the reading room were not conducive to reading. One observer described the overall atmosphere as ‘funereal’. By changing policies, staff and operations, and by acquiring gap fillers, complementary books and better lights, successive librarians unlocked the Folger and made it work more fully as a research library.

  The Folger’s post-war director Louis Wright broadened the acquisition strategy, particularly in books from the second half of the seventeenth century, such as Jacques Boileau’s 1678 work, A Just and Seasonable Reprehension of Naked Breasts and Shoulders, Written by a Grave and Learned Papist and The Compleat English and French Cook (1690), which contains recipes for many remarkable dishes such as ‘Eels Boiled’ and ‘Pig-pye after the newest fashion’.

  Wright was anxious that the Folger be seen as a friendly place. He transformed the front-door sentries into cleaners. In decisions about staffing, he steered clear of a certain type of woman librarian, which he described as ‘owl-eyed and awkward, wearing spectacles and an air of gloom’. Wright searched the northern hemisphere for ‘bright young women’ genuinely interested in books and the operations of a research library. ‘We are not impressed,’ he wrote, ‘when some young thing gushes that she “just loves Shakespeare”. A love of Shakespeare is less important than common sense and an ability to type.’ In England, Hungary, Greece and California he found what he was looking for. One of his prize recruits, a ‘cheerful young lady’ named Janice Jacques, brought a welcoming, Franco-Californian atmosphere to the front office.

  Wright painted a picture of staff conditions—and the newly installed roof garden where ‘girls sunned themselves’—as idyllic as Poggio’s water nymphs of Baden. This picture stands in stark contrast to the Vatican Library’s cold and ‘half naked’ assistants. Though crows rather than starlings cawed in the magnolias, the Folger’s beautiful gardens became an intrinsic part of how the library was experienced.

  (Crows infiltrated the Folger in more ways than one. A note in a Folger volume, a 1574 history of the doges of Venice, warns, ‘Whoever snatches this book, let ravens snatch his guts’.)

  A network of tunnels, crypts, pseudo-dungeons and oubliettes lurks beneath the Folger. At the height of the Cold War, some Washingtonians believed atomic destruction was imminent, civilisation ‘hardly worth saving, much less studying’. But the Folger’s staff, refusing to flee to some ‘God-forsaken Patagonian refuge’, continued to curate and study. Wright knew where he wanted to be when the bombs fell. ‘The really safe spots are going to be crowded with people we won’t like. We’ll just stay here and keep our air conditioning going as long as it will run, and read solid Renaissance sermons on innate depravity—a theme which somehow cheers us.’ Just in case, Wright’s team made plans to use the Folger’s catacombs as a bomb shelter, where the staff could ‘sweat it out in highbrow comfort’.

  (At Yale University, rumours circulated that, in the event of a nuclear attack, the Beinecke Library could descend and become an ultra-modern, uber-bookish shelter. The stream that runs beneath the library is just one of several damning problems with that rumour.)

  The formal launch of the Folger had coincided with the opening, in Stratford-upon-Avon, of the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (now the Royal Shakespeare Theatre). The Folger, too, had a replica playhouse, intended to host academic lectures while evoking Elizabethan England. The theatre was not intended for performances; it had no dressing rooms, for example, and did not comply with the fire code. But the Folger did eventually hold plays there. After Wright persuaded the municipal authorities to make an allowance, the theatre hosted its first play in 1949: a production of Julius Caesar by the Amherst Masquers. Many performances followed, including of some of the more obscure plays from the First Folio.

  Like the librarians of Alexandria, and like Herr Doktor Peter Kien of Vienna, Henry Folger was gulled by unscrupulous dealers and artefact pedlars. Many of the First Folios he bought were in poor shape. (‘A good copy’, ‘well read’, ‘not in collectable condition’, ‘a reading copy’—these are all book-trade euphemisms for clunkers.) Some Folger First Folios had been scrawled in by children, or were made up with pages from Second Folios and facsimile leaves. Some lacked title pages or other prelims; some lacked whole plays. One copy that Folger purchased in 1907 lacked more than half its leaves—not really a First Folio at all. Cropped, bumped, canted, wormed, worn, food-stained, oil-stained—Folger’s folios were a catalogue of woes. In addition to copies that were ‘too dirty’, some were ‘too clean’—ruined by overzealous washing, a common practice in the nineteenth century. Booksellers smiled when they saw Folger coming.

  Apart from being duped into paying over the odds for genuine items, he was also sold forgeries and worthless trifles. For an exorbitant price, a dealer sold him a small picture of David Garrick. The dealer called it an original sketch by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In fact it was a cheap photographic print that a backstreet bookman had dipped in water-colour to add the appearance of age. The value? Maybe twenty cents on a good day. Folger vacuumed up Shakespeare busts whenever they came on the market. One such purchase was an oversized replica, rendered in modern concrete, of Shakespeare’s death mask. Long after Folger’s own death, Wright offered to trade the mask for something more useful: perhaps ‘a few loads of good topsoil’ for the Folger gardens. Wright offloaded other items of similarly dubious value. The Folger Library’s attic bulged with poster-portraits of actors and actresses, ‘which formerly hung in theatre lobbies and are too big to hang anywhere on our premises. They are just about right for a Texas oil millionaire’s mansion, and we shall be receptive to a good offer’.

  Many visitors to the Folger asked Wright and his staff about an enchanting object in the collection: the corset, which Henry Folger purchased and which was supposed to have belonged to Queen Elizabeth I. To sate the public’s curiosity, Wright had it put on display along with an acknowledgment that the staff could not verify its authenticity.

  It was acquired years ago from a dealer anxious to sell Mr Folger anything of human interest dating from the period. The only provenance the dealer could supply was the statement from an old lady who brought it to his shop that ‘a tradition in the family said it once belonged to Queen Elizabeth’.

  Wright sent images of the corset to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Donald King, assistant keeper in the Museum’s Department of Textiles, looked closely at the underwear and concluded that it dated from the first half of the eighteenth century, and that ‘no such corsets are known from the Elizabethan period’. Wright reported with regret,

  We cannot even attribute it to Queen Anne or to one of the mistresses of George I, for their known girths were too great for our corset to encompass. We shall have to change our exhibition label to read ‘One old corset, late Queen Anne or early Georgian’.

  Other dubious Folger relics include a collection of objects supposedly made from a mulberry tree that Shakespeare planted in Stratford-upon-Avon. A chair, a thimble, a ring, a rolling pin, a tobacco box, a pipe tamper, an inkstand, a goblet, a caddy and a cassolette. If all the mulberry objects were piled up, they would account for more timber than all the fragments of the True Cross.

  The list of forgeries foisted on the Folger also includes fake bindings, several of which pretend to be from the sixteenth century—and are attached to genuine sixteenth-century texts—but were in fact made in the nineteenth century. The library holds, for example, a fake ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ binding (on a 1515 volume of Cicero) that was expertly executed in
goatskin. The binding was thought to be authentic, until Anthony Hobson, the world’s greatest expert on Renaissance bindings, noticed minute details that gave the game away. In the gilt block on the upper cover, the wheel of Apollo’s chariot has four spokes—instead of the requisite six—and the inscription around the central medallion was applied as an integrated part of the block, rather than being tooled separately. The binding, it turns out, was as fake as J. P. Morgan’s smashed pots. Vittorio Villa made it (possibly for Demetrio Canevari, a Genoese doctor) by taking a simply decorated sixteenth-century cover and adding gilt decoration to mimic the grand bindings made in Rome in 1545–47 for Giovanni Battista Grimaldi.

  Notwithstanding these impostors, the Folger collections are rich with bookish gold. Important manuscripts, fine early editions, sumptuous bindings, extensive ephemera, striking realia. Items of great beauty and incalculable scholarly value. In spectacular fulfilment of its founders’ goal, the library is a marvellous memorial to Shakespeare. It is also a first-class research institution. The Folger attracts scholars from around the world and runs a rich program of events. It is no exaggeration to say that the library has become the global head office of Shakespeare studies.

  The riven nature of Shakespeare scholarship, though, makes that honour a dubious one. The field has been likened to a shark tank and a snake pit. A thousand controversies persist, and the hottest of these is the so-called Authorship Question—the question of whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The authorship controversy presents a conundrum for the Folger. What if the unthinkable happens and the question is resolved in favour of one of the many claimants—perhaps Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere or Henry Neville? If the heretics are right, then the Folger is a ridiculous institution, dedicated to a lie. This possibility has certainly occurred to the Folger’s directors, who have adopted a variety of ‘risk mitigation strategies’ over the years. Broadening the acquisition of early texts is one. Acquiring both orthodox and unorthodox Shakespearean works is another. Several key figures of heretical Shakespeare scholarship are American. Delia Bacon was from Ohio, Orville Owen hailed from Michigan, and Diana Price from Connecticut—and their books are in the Folger.

  Though far from being a Shakespeare sceptic, Louis Wright was a key hedger at the Folger. He consistently de-emphasised Shakespeare as the library’s focus and rationale. Instead, he augmented the collection to such an extent that it became important worldwide as a sixteenth and seventeenth-century English collection per se, with multiple author and subject strengths. Vocally, Wright opposed Stratford-upon-Avon’s ‘Barnum and Bailey’ version of bardology—and this stance won him friends on the side of unorthodoxy. In 1956 a ‘well-meaning and worried friend of the Folger’ asked whether Wright was concerned about the devaluation of the library’s assets, ‘in case the promoters of Christopher Marlowe proved that he wrote Shakespeare’s plays’. Wright assured the friend cheerfully that the Folger ‘had hedged years ago by acquiring one of the finest Marlowe collections in the world’. As a consequence, the Folger was ‘sitting pretty’; the friend appeared relieved.

  Another Folger Library strategy is to strive to be the ‘go to’ place for debating and deliberating on Shakespearean controversies and discoveries. An example is the recent ‘discovery’ by two booksellers of ‘Shakespeare’s Dictionary’. The thought processes of the Folger’s leaders are easy to picture. How should the library react to what is surely a double try-on by the booksellers—to pump the value of the book, and to secure a publishing deal for the story of their research? The Folger worries about validating bad palaeography and bad bibliography, and wants to avoid damage by association. But it also likes to create a buzz around Shakespeare, and to spur and capture the enthusiasm that such finds can generate. Most important of all, the Folger wants to be the destination for people with questions and material like this. By arbitrating and adjudicating the validity of contested Shakespeareana, the Folger can solidify its position as the global Shakespeare authority.

  And the final mitigation strategy for the library is a simple one. Be ready, just in case, to change the business cards, the letterhead, the marble frieze and that unfortunate brass plaque.

  Birth

  About 85 million years ago—in the time of the dinosaurs—primates diverged from tree-shrews and other mammals. About 20 million years ago, the apes diverged from the gibbons. About 8 million years ago, our human and chimpanzee ancestors diverged from gorillas. Between 6 and 4 million years ago, those ancestors diverged from each other—but only after a slow break-up featuring more than a million awkward years of recidivist interbreeding and hybridisation. Between 250,000 and 100,000 years ago, humans began to speak. About five thousand years ago—after the domestication of horses, the cultivation of chilli, the brewing of beer, the hoisting of sails and the spinning of clay—humans began to write. Three years ago, paramedics and librarians helped deliver a baby girl in the children’s section of Edmonton Green Library in Lancashire.

  CHAPTER 14

  Killing a Monk

  Fantasy libraries

  Marvellous libraries are a staple of fantasy and science fiction. Iain Banks, Philip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Jack Vance, Jon Sladek and J. R. R. Tolkien all created striking visions of fantastical libraries. In Tik-Tok, Sladek imagined a vast, interplanetary, mobile library. ‘Tik-Tok’, Sladek’s humanoid robot anti-hero, finds himself aboard the Liberian-registered Doodlebug, a gargantuan spaceship that was designed to enable the super-wealthy to tour the solar system. But, after an economic slump, the ship was repurposed to transport livestock. Union rules prohibited robots from working on the ship, so Tik-Tok had time on his hands. He frequented the silent ballroom, the deluxe bathrooms, the first-class coffee room and the first-class library.

  To properly explore the library’s ‘incomparable’ book collection, Tik-Tok established rules. This day, he could only consult volumes that featured a robot character named Robbie. On another day, books about Mars, or autobiographies of former nuns, or titles beginning with ‘U’—titles ‘often seeming to conceal profane meanings’, like Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; The Urinal of Physick; Up the Junction; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  In the Doctor Who episode ‘Silence in the Library’, the Doctor is trapped on a planet-sized library infested with ‘tiny piranhas that live in the shadows’. At Unseen University on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, magical codices struggle against their chains, and the orangutan librarian is a formidable protector of three things: silence, the library’s lending policies, and the physical laws of the universe.

  In Night Lamp by Jack Vance, the characters Jaro and Skirl find, in the abandoned palace of Somar, a great library crowded with books more than 1000 years old; ‘ponderous and thick, with covers of carved board and pages alternating text and hand-wrought illumination’. Some of the volumes exhale pleasant fragrances of wax and preservative. A local cavalier explains how each book is a personal record that tells the story of a life. Part diary, part revelation, part poetry, each book is a statement, a repository of secrets and private theories. And each book is richly illustrated by its creator in a revealing personal style. In this way, the books both express and achieve their authors’ wishes to live forever. By capturing the creative essence, each book can ‘clasp time and make it a static thing, so that the person who created the book would forever be alive, half dreaming his way back and forth through the pages he had created so lovingly’. Behind the library walls are secret passages, some of which lead to safe-houses, others to the homes of ghouls.

  Like Night Lamp, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Night Bookmobile is a fantastical treatment of the themes of books and death. In Niffenegger’s book, a young woman has a mysterious night-time encounter—with a mobile library. The library is a Winnebago–Tardis that contains every book she has ever read, or grazed, or dipped into. The librarian, Mr Openshaw, carefully curates the collection. After this first encounter, the woman
searches for the Night Bookmobile but does not see it for another nine years. When she again meets Openshaw she begs him to employ her as his assistant. He refuses but she enrols in librarianship studies and goes to work at the Sulzer branch of the Chicago Public Library. Twelve years later she sees Openshaw and the Bookmobile again, but he repeats his refusal to hire her. Only after her death does the answer change. Taking her own life, she finds herself with Openshaw in the ‘Central Reading Room of The Library’. Thereafter, she becomes a Bookmobile librarian and curates the collection that her own designated reader is forming.

  The 2014 film Interstellar explores the same themes as Night Lamp and The Night Bookmobile. The film’s climax takes place inside a library, which in turn is inside a black hole. The library is a hyper-real version of the brown-toned, ultra-modern, perfectly geometrical Beinecke Library. (From the perspective of the film’s astro-pioneer Joseph Cooper, the books are shelved spine outwards, like Odorico Pillone’s.) The film has been criticised as overlong, overblown and, worst of all, implausible. Cooper’s entry into the black hole stretches believability but not the spaceman himself; he avoids being splattered in three dimensions or smeared across four. But the climax works exceptionally well. Through the Borgesian metaphor of an infinite library of stacked bookshelves, the film’s director solves the problem of depicting unlimited space-time on a limited cinema screen.

  Shelves of books are an apt metaphor for communication across time, linking past and future, and an apt signifier of infinity and immortality. The black-hole library is narratively powerful but it also contains physical truth. Curiously, multidimensionality and information both have central places in black-hole physics. A recent theory, for example, proposes that the observable universe is a three-dimensional projection on the event horizon of a four-dimensional black hole. Theories such as this disrupt the frontiers between digital and analogue, and virtual and reality. And they animate a sixth-century Cabbalistic vision, in the Sefer Yezirah, of the universe as one created from letters and numbers.