by Stuart Kells
It is a heritage that took decades and decades to come to fruition but will be wiped out in a moment. You are not only about to make philistines of yourselves, but philistines of us all.
Authors Malorie Blackman, Julia Donaldson, Anne Fine and Philip Pullman penned an open letter in which they called the plans to close the libraries wrong and immoral. Focusing government austerity cuts on libraries was misguided, the authors said. ‘The cost in educational underachievement would far outweigh any savings made by cuts.’
Campaigning in 2015 to save sixteen libraries in Fife, Ian Rankin related how the Bowhill Library had been his ‘refuge and a place of constant wonder’ during his childhood, where he’d borrow as many books at a time as possible. He remembered ‘the thrill of being told I’d reached the age where I could have an adult ticket and take books from the adult fiction section’. Paul Mason spoke for a whole slice of Britain’s working-class children when he wrote in 2016, ‘We had been headed for university since we picked up Ladybird books.’ The history of libraries is rich with stories of how ready access to books meant access to work and social mobility, and the awakening of intellectual lives. Shutting down libraries, people feared, would prevent the chairs from jumping on the tables.
In 2014 a group of poets and authors put their names to a ‘love letter’ to Liverpool’s libraries, the loss of which would devastate the city: ‘it’s a massacre, and at the expense of the children of Liverpool most of all.’ On a national day of protest, Mary Warnock fought the closure of her local library. ‘In times of economic misery and unemployment,’ she said, ‘we need more not less consolation from libraries.’
Warnock’s battle cry raises an important question: what exactly are libraries for? Scores of rationales have been put forward; scores of stories have been told. Libraries are an attempt to impose order in a world of chaos. They are signifiers of power (consider the libraries of Mesopotamian kings and American presidents) and prestige (remember the libraries of America’s robber barons). They are an aide-mémoire of the species, a network of sanctuaries, a civilising influence in the New World, places of solace and education, sources of nourishment for the human spirit, cultural staging posts in which new arrivals can be inducted into their adopted countries. They are places for social connection and the creation of ‘social capital’. They are places in which to give birth. They are places of redemption.
For Umberto Eco, the ideal library was humane and lighthearted, a place where two students could sit on a couch in the afternoon and, without doing anything too indecent, ‘enjoy the continuation of their flirtation in the library as they take down or replace some books of scientific interest from their shelves’. For Panizzi, the British Museum Library was a portrait of Britain’s soul. ‘What mattered to Panizzi was that every aspect of British life and thought be represented, so that the library could become a showcase of the nation itself.’
Much more than accumulations of books, the best libraries are hotspots and organs of civilisation; magical places in which students, scholars, curators, philanthropists, artists, pranksters and flirts come together and make something marvellous.
Yet none of these descriptions fits comfortably in the arid, clinical, neo-liberal, managerial paradigm of inputs and outputs and outcomes. And therein lies a problem. Throughout most of the modern world, that very paradigm guides how public funds are spent. The inputs for libraries (books, librarians, capital) are easy enough to identify, and to count. But what are the ‘outputs’ of a library, and how might the ‘outcomes’ be measured? The ‘performance’ of libraries resists evaluation as much as the ‘customers’ of libraries resist classification.
Those customers—some of them certainly classifiable as ‘casual strollers’—are typically and uncooperatively diverse. In The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel recorded this remark from an observer at the British Library:
Every day the library is filled with, among others, people sleeping, students doing their homework, bright young things writing film scripts—in fact, doing almost anything except consulting the library’s books.
‘Investing in a library,’ another observer said, ‘requires an act of faith.’ But leaps of faith are precisely what the cost-sphinctering managerialist paradigm is meant to prevent. The people of Alexandria and Athens knew the value of books for scholarship and culture and civil society. In large part, the history of libraries is the history of how that value was forgotten, then rediscovered, then forgotten again.
The Star Wars prequels introduced the Jedi temple and, at its heart, the Jedi library—a digital collection of books and star maps and other inter-galactic media. As author and book historian David Pearson noticed, the design of the Jedi library is strikingly reminiscent of the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin. So reminiscent, in fact, that the library issued a ‘please explain’ to Lucasfilm. The resulting legal skirmish provided a curious metaphor for how traditional libraries are grappling with digitisation and the internet. In 2017 libraries are at a digital crossroads. Most of the printed books in the Vatican are now electronically tagged, and many of them have been digitally scanned. Around the world, such technologies are transforming how books and archives are held, and how they are shared and accessed.
The digitisation of bibliographical treasure is a valuable means through which rare books and manuscripts can be discovered, studied, appreciated and enjoyed. Digitisation, combined with on-line publication, gives easy access to texts from anywhere in the world. Ease of access to rare materials is a boon, as is ease of discoverability. Digitisation is also a technique of conservation. The case for digitising early and precious materials is obvious, particularly for especially delicate books that cannot be handled without endangering them.
The seeming permanence of digital data, though, is not entirely reliable. Some digital storages are even more ephemeral than paper ones. David Pearson recounted the story from the 1980s of the electronic Domesday Book, a venture funded by the BBC to record digitally 250,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving pictures, plus scores of accounts of daily life. The project, to which over a million people contributed, serves as a salutary lesson about the limitations of digital preservation. The resulting ‘book’ was stored on laser disks that could only be read by a special BBC computer. Sixteen years later, these computers had all but disappeared, superseded by other technologies. When readers attempted to recover the digital data, the attempt failed. Only after a massive recovery effort—that involved painstaking unpicking of hexadecimal data, and resort to the original analogue master tapes—could the ‘book’ be read. All the while, the original, thousand-year-old Domesday Book housed in Kew remained entirely readable.
There are other reasons, too, why digital conservation can be unsatisfactory. Many aspects of books are alien to digitisation: indicators of provenance, marginalia, bindings, paper, watermarks, edition variants, the feel of impressed type, and the physical experience—including the smell—of handling a book; each of these is an intrinsic part of every story of every book. An encounter with an old book is miserably dimmed-down if the reader cannot savour the tactile experience of rotating a delicate volvelle, or folding out a map, or seeing a colour plate in context. Not surprisingly, the rise of digitisation has coincided with a rise in physical bibliography and other book-history disciplines that are founded on real, non-digital book-objects.
Something else is lost, too, in the experience of digital browsing. Browsing books on a screen is utterly alien to the delight of browsing and getting lost in a physical, fractal, serendipitous library of real books. This book has walked through many different species of the wonder of libraries: secret, hidden spaces; marvellous chance discoveries; high art in paint, stucco, timber and stone; and every aspect of the human drama, from triumph to despair. The physicality of books in libraries—spines, fore-edges, verticality, shelf-marks, bookcases, stacks, stalls, halls, domes—all these may be read so that we may know the histories of th
e books and the libraries: when and how they were made, how they were used and appreciated. In the case of digital texts and digital libraries, such a mode of reading is impossible or irrelevant.
Before Google Books there was Project Gutenberg, which placed tens of thousands of texts on the internet. Alberto Manguel lamented that many of the texts were duplicates, and many more were unreliable, ‘having been hastily scanned and badly checked for typographical errors’. Paul Duguid noticed another problem of curation. While in many ways Project Gutenberg resembled—and even improved upon—a traditional, analogue library, it also resembled ‘a church jumble-sale bookstall, where gems and duds are blessed alike by the vicar because all have been donated’.
In an unpublished survey conducted in March 2003 (and cited by Andrew Madden, Joe Palimi and Jared Bryson in 2005), Andrew Madden asked 176 students at a Sheffield school to indicate, on a five-point scale, the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about the internet. Eighty-six percent of the students (aged eleven to sixteen) agreed that ‘The internet is like a library’. The same questionnaire was circulated among delegates of the ‘Internet Librarian’ International Conference in 2003. There, only a third of the respondents disagreed with the statement.
Madden and Palimi and Bryson, though, contested the analogy, arguing that the internet was better understood as a collection of monologues, or even as a bar room, ‘because most of its users are men, and most of the talk is of sex and sport’. These unbounded monologues are inherently uncuratable, which brings us back to the central message of Borges’s infinite library. Without boundaries and selection and navigation, libraries are useless. Whether bar room or jumble sale, the internet is both a curse and a blessing for libraries. The world wide web is traditional libraries’ principal competitor, but it is also their saviour because, in the internet era, there is an urgent need for selection and curation.
Behind digitisation, there has always been anxiety about a bleak future, in which libraries would become ‘content management centres’, books would be replaced by screens, and a rump of codices would be consigned to ancillary museums as book-artefact curios. In 1966 a delegation of librarians and scholars from Oxford and Cambridge visited Louis Wright at the Folger Shakespeare Library. On their trip the visitors had seen example after example of how new technologies were transforming libraries. ‘For two weeks,’ one delegate said, ‘we have heard nothing but computers, computers, computers. A book would comfort me.’ In moments of gloom, Wright foresaw dreary hordes of students punching away at computers and reading machines, unaware of the pleasures of handling a book. Machinery, he feared, would ultimately estrange people from life’s humanistic interests. Reading a book on screen or in microfilm was an unsatisfactory experience, like kissing a girl through a windowpane.
Afterlife
Two blocks from Nevsky Prospekt, in an apartment on the southeast bank of St Petersburg’s Moika River, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin—Russia’s most celebrated poet—assembled a private library of some 4000 books. B. L. Modzalevsky later catalogued 1505 of them: more than 400 were Russian, and the remaining ‘foreign’ books were mostly in French. The library was rich in the classics. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Leibniz, Dante, Byron, Bunyan, the Bible, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Tocqueville’s On Democracy in America. There were also plentiful books on horses, philosophy, art, medicine, cooking, the civil war in England and the revolution in France. There were books published in Paris, Perpignan, Brussels, London, Rome, Venice, Dijon, Lyon, Naples, Dublin, New York, Philadelphia, Constantinople—and a book from a Tunbridge circulating library. Many volumes in the library featured Pushkin’s marginalia, pencilling, underlining, inscriptions, laconic observations, question marks and sharp nail marks.
Pushkin married Natalya Goncharova in 1831. Six years later, Baron Georges H. D’Anthès—the husband of Natalya’s sister Ekaterina—attempted to seduce Natalya. The adopted son of the Dutch ambassador, D’Anthès was a French officer serving with the Chevalier Guard Regiment. Despite the likely differences in marksmanship, the poet challenged the warrior to a duel. In the days leading up to the contest, Pushkin visited the Hermitage gallery, where, according to George Steiner, he
sang nursery rhymes to the granddaughter of the poet Krylov, saw D’Anthès and his own sister-in-law across the room at a soirée, struck friends as ‘merry and full of life’ and went to Countess Razumovskaya’s glittering ball.
On 27 January 1837 the combatants and their ‘seconds’ met on a field of snow outside St Petersburg. D’Anthès shot Pushkin in the lower abdomen and was himself also wounded. Pushkin’s friends loaded him on a sleigh, took him to his apartment at 12 Moika, and summoned the lexicographer and naval doctor Vladimir Dahl.
Pushkin died slowly and in agony over the next forty-eight hours, attended by Dahl and surrounded by books. At 2.45 p.m. on 29 January 1837, the poet’s heart stopped. He was only thirty-seven. His apartment, carefully restored, is now the Pushkin Apartment Museum. More than a century after the poet’s death, forensic scientists studied his leather sofa and confirmed—after exhaustive testing that included making and dressing a paper model of his corpse—that the bloodstains were his.
Multiple versions of Pushkin’s last words have reached us. One version has him pressing Dahl’s hand and begging, ‘Lift me up, let us go higher, still higher.’ Another has him saying, ‘It is finished. I am going, I am going,’ then, falling back on his pillow, ‘I can hardly breathe, I am suffocating.’ The most fitting and arresting version, though, has him pointing to his bookcases and saying to Dahl, ‘It seemed to me that you and I were climbing up those shelves.’ Pushkin then addresses his final utterance to his books: ‘Farewell, friends.’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book owes its existence in large part to the generous support of the State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW), Ashurst Australia, the Monash University Centre for the Book and the Monash School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics. Professor Wallace Kirsop and Joan Kirsop have long been leading figures in the Centre, the School and the wider book world. Wallace and Joan introduced me to leading librarians around the world, and provided unstinting support in countless other ways. They and others read the manuscript and gave valuable comments; all the remaining errors are of course my own. The award of the Ashurst prize, administered by the SLNSW, allowed me to visit libraries in Zurich, Sankt Gallen, London, Oxford, Boston, Cambridge Massachusetts, New York, Washington DC and Sydney. My home town of Melbourne, too, is well endowed with libraries—including the State Library of Victoria (SLV), the Matheson Library and the Baillieu Library—and I made full use of them as well.
I am grateful to the current and former custodians of all these libraries, and specifically to Des Cowley, Sue Hamilton and Kate Molloy of the SLV; the State Library User Organisations’ Council; the Friends of the SLV; Richard Overell and Stephen Herrin of the Monash Rare Books Library; Philip Kent and Shane Carmody of the University of Melbourne libraries; Dr Francesca Galligan and Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian and Weston Libraries; Giles Mandelbrote of the Lambeth Palace Library; Peter Accardo of the Houghton Library; Susanne Woodhouse of the British Museum; and the librarians and staff of the British Library, the Wellcome Library, University College London, the National Library of Australia, the Swiss National Museum, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Widener Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian libraries and the abbey library at St Gall, where reverently I donned the special slippers that everyone must wear to protect the marvellous floor. I also gratefully acknowledge the National Library of China, the National Library of Indonesia, the National Library of Mexico, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Tsinghua University Library, Nanjing University Library, Friends of the Williamstown and Newport Libraries, the Goldfields Libraries, Yarra Plenty Regional Library, the Abbots
ford Convent Foundation, Humanities 21 and the UNESCO City of Literature.
I further acknowledge the work of prior authors on the libraries explored in this book, including Maria Siponta de Salvia, Daniel Mendelsohn and John Preston on the Vatican Library and Secret Archive; P. R. Harris on the history of the British Museum reading room; Al Alvarez and Dido Merwin on the destruction of Ted Hughes’s personal papers; Nicolas Barker on the sale of books from the John Rylands Library; Ann Galbally, Fiona Salisbury and the SLV librarians on Redmond Barry’s personal library and day books; Eileen Chanin and Charles Stitz on David Scott Mitchell and the Mitchell Library; Jonathan J. G. Alexander on medieval manuscript illumination and scriptoria; Alberto Manguel on the dépôts littéraires and bibliothèques publiques; George Steiner, B. L. Modzalevsky and Andrew Kahn on Alexander Pushkin’s library; Carl J. Weber on the art of fore-edge decoration; James Campbell regarding Metten Abbey in Bavaria and the Altenburg library in Lower Austria; J. M. Clark, Anthony Hobson, Johannes Huber, Karl Schmuki, Ernst Tremp and the staff of the abbey library of St Gall and the Swiss National Museum on the abbey library’s history; Anthony Hobson and Lucien X. Polastron on the bibliocrimes perpetrated at Christ Church College, the Ambrosian Library, the Colombina Library, Dublin’s Trinity College, the Jesuit church in Brussels, the public libraries of Heidelberg and Paris, the abbey library at Admont, and the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian; Alan Johnston and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers regarding thefts from the Girolamini Library in Naples; Allison Hoover Bartlett on the subject of John Charles Gilkey; Umberto Eco for his reflections on The Name of the Rose; George Wheeler, Ron Chernow and the Morgan librarians (including the curators of the ‘Master’s Hand’ exhibition) regarding the Pierpont Morgan Library; Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner regarding Tolkien’s ‘mathom houses’; Nicholas Pickwood on the history of false raised bands; Christine Fernon and the Sydney Morning Herald on the McArthur River Institute; the Islington librarians and Joe Orton’s diaries for details of his library ‘creations’; Arnold Hunt, A. N. L. Munby, Alberto Manguel and Anthony Hobson on the Earl of Ashburnham, Count Libri and Bibliotheca Heberiana; Holbrook Jackson on the Irish ‘Dragon’ and, along with Andrew Prescott, Sir Robert Cotton’s library and the fire at Ashburnham House; A. N. L. Munby and Mary Pollard on the Cavendish fire at Clontarf; the Beinecke Library, Yale, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, for details of the Vanderbilt–Rosenbach and Weatherup–Rosenbach copies of the Bay Psalm Book; Leigh Hunt, Peter Cochran and Corin Throsby on Lord Byron and the burning of his papers; Nadia Khomani, Lee Hall, Mary Warnock and Bill West on local library closures in Britain; Louis Wright, Andrea Mays, Stephen H. Grant and the Folger librarians and newsletters regarding the Folger Shakespeare Library; and Nicholas Shakespeare and the Australian Dictionary of Biography on Bruce Chatwin, Theodore Strehlow and the oral libraries of ancient Australia.
