Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  The Bodleian – affectionately known as the Bod – comprises a network of thirty libraries linked by underground tunnels. It is stuffed with literary treasures – ranging from four original manuscripts of the Magna Carta and a copy of the Gutenburg Bible to the handwritten manuscript of The Wind in the Willows and the entire archive of Alan Bennett. And of course there’s a copy of every book published in the UK, as well as printed material like the Yellow Pages, instruction manuals and every newspaper. The library is simply bursting at the seams, with an eye-popping 6 million books stored on 117 miles of shelving. It’s a far cry from Oxford’s first library, founded in 1320, a small first-floor room with a collection of chained books that could fit inside a single chest. The collection grew steadily, and in 1488 the Duke Humphrey’s Library was built to house the gift of manuscripts from the Duke of Gloucester. The new library was plundered during the Reformation, when, according to the antiquarian Anthony Wood, ‘some of those books so taken out by the Reformers were burnt, some sold away for Robin Hood’s pennyworths, either to Booksellers, or to Glovers to press their gloves, or Taylors to make measures, or to Bookbinders to cover books bound by them’. By the end of the sixteenth century the university had barely a library at all. All the furniture had been sold and only three of Duke Humphrey’s original books remained in the collection.

  Enter Sir Thomas Bodley, a diplomat in the service of Queen Elizabeth I, who decided on his retirement to ‘set up my Staffe at the Librarie dore in Oxon’. He poured money into refurbishing the library, which reopened in 1602 as ‘Bodley’s Library’. It’s jokingly said the library was founded on pilchards, as Sir Thomas’ wife was the widow of a wealthy fish merchant. Sir Thomas set about restocking the new library, donating some of the books himself and encouraging friends, amongst them Sir Walter Raleigh, to do likewise. Bodley didn’t want any books in English at first – he called them ‘baggage books’ and ‘riff raff’ – but soon realized that books were increasingly being printed in English rather than in Latin. And so in 1610 he made an historic agreement with the Stationers’ Company in London to put a copy of every book registered with them in the library. The arrangement set the Bodley on a road of continuous expansion and formed the basis for copyright libraries across the world. Today the Bodleian is one of six copyright libraries – or legal deposit libraries as they’re now called – in the British Isles , entitled by law to receive a free copy of every book published in the UK. (The other five are the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and of Wales and the Library of Trinity College Dublin.)

  One of the early fruits of the deposit arrangement was the acquisition of Shakespeare’s First Folio. (Folio is a printer’s term for a sheet of paper folded in half to make two leaves or four pages of a book or manuscript.) It was sent by the Stationers’ Company to Oxford in 1623, bound by William Wildgoose, a local stationer, and chained to a shelf in the Bodleian. At some point in the 1660s it was sold and replaced by the Third Folio, the librarian presumably assuming the First Folio to be out of date. He didn’t anticipate it becoming one of the most valuable printed books in the world. A copy sold for £3.73 million at Christie’s in New York in 2001. The First Folio was lost to the library for 240 years. When it finally resurfaced as part of a family heirloom in 1905, the Bodleian had to launch a public appeal to raise the hefty asking price of £3,000. It was the largest sum it had ever paid for a book – the previous record payment fifteen years before was £221 and 10 shillings for a volume of Anglo-Saxon charters. Part of the First Folio’s appeal is surely the wear and tear of the pages, proof that in the mid 1600s, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was clearly the favourite of students.

  As the Bodleian became home to a growing number of valuable tomes and manuscripts, the oath ‘not to remove from the Library … any volume’ was vigorously enforced. No one has ever been allowed to take a book from the Bod; it has to be read on the premises or not at all. Even Charles I, who had made Oxford the royalist capital during the Civil War, was refused when he tried to borrow a volume. Cromwell too.

  Like Alice, the Bodleian’s book collection grew and grew and grew – as did the number of buildings needed to house them. Today books are arriving at the rate of 1,000 a day. It’s a storage nightmare.

  The New Bodleian building was built in 1939. Ian Fleming kept his personal library here during the war and donated the manuscript of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as a thank you. This building alone has 95 kilometres of books. There’s another two and a half million books sitting in humidity-free darkness in a salt mine in Cheshire.

  The problem of where to keep the majority of the least-read books is being met with the opening at the end of 2010 of a huge storage facility in Swindon, 25 miles outside Oxford. The removal of 6 million books and more than 1.2 million maps is well underway. All the books in high demand will stay in Oxford as well as all the Bodleian’s literary treasures.

  Among these treasures is the Abingdon Missal, created for the abbey of Abingdon in 1461. It’s handwritten in tiny, Gothic script and illuminated on vellum. You can even see the lines the scribes ruled to keep their writing straight. This missal was one of the last hurrahs of labour-intensive, handwritten manuscripts. It was produced at almost exactly the same time that Gutenberg was printing his Bible and sounding the death knell of the copiers, although it took some years for print to be completely established.

  Then there is The First Book of the Natural History by Pliny the Elder, translated into the Florentine language for the King of Naples, a heavily bound manuscript from 1476, the same year as the printing press arrived in England. It is utterly beautiful, the most spectacular surviving copy of the work, with a binding made from green goatskin studded with silver ornaments. It’s an example of a crossover between new and old technologies: it’s printed in a very modern font (Times Roman, the inspiration for the Times New Roman typeface in the 1930s) and is in vernacular Italian rather than Latin, but it uses vellum and hand illumination to make it look like the traditional manuscripts.

  Some would say that world is coming to an end, and a new digital age is replacing it. Books and academic papers and maps and newspapers are now being produced electronically, and the Bodleian has a duty to preserve them all. Today racks of computer servers sit alongside the bookshelves, saving and archiving millions of gigabytes of information. It’s a daunting task, but Richard Ovenden, the library’s associate director and keeper of special collections, insists that good librarianship is all about ensuring that information from the present can be accessed by those in the future.

  ‘We have staff whose job it is to keep stuff safe so that scholars in 400 years’ time will be able to access the information that’s being produced now, just as we’re able to access the information printed by a great scholar … The University of Oxford has been keeping records since the late twelfth century, so it’s almost genetically in our system that we need to keep this information over a long term.’

  The Bodleian looks after the private papers of seven former prime ministers, which historians can pore over. The archiving of historical material will continue, says Richard, but in different ways.

  ‘The politicians of today and tomorrow are communicating with their friends not by writing letters like Disraeli did, thousands and thousands of them, but by sending emails. They’re communicating with their constituents not by publishing little pamphlets but by blogging and tweeting and putting web pages up. And as we’re one of the great repositories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics, we’re having to develop our own digital infrastructure to capture that information, keep it safe, manage it and make it accessible to researchers.’

  The potential for digitalization in the library system is huge. The Bodleian has signed a deal with Google to digitize more than a million books and has already scanned about half a million of them. The benefits have already been seen, as it’s opened up huge ranges of nineteenth-century books that sat unseen on shelves for 150 years
. Richard Ovenden is excited about the future.

  ‘It’s always been part of what we see as “serving the whole republic of the learned”, as Sir Thomas Bodley put it – sharing our knowledge. There’s no point in having this great body of information if you can’t give access to it.’

  Andrew Carnegie

  Although libraries in various forms have been around since ancient times, it was only in the nineteenth century that the truly public library, paid for by taxes and run by the state and freely accessible to everyone, came into being on a large scale. Before that, libraries were predominantly the private collections of individuals, or belonged to religious or educational institutions, and weren’t open to the general public.

  The Victorian era was the era of self-improvement and education of the masses, and public libraries played a central role. As did a man whose name became synonymous with the movement: the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

  Carnegie emigrated to America from Scotland and became one of the richest men in the world. A sort of nineteenth-century industrial tycoon version of Bill Gates, he spent forty years amassing a huge fortune from iron and steel, and then started to give it away for the public good. ‘The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced,’ he wrote and, good as his word, by the time he died in 1919, he had poured more than £70 million into educational and scientific ventures, including the building of nearly 3,000 free libraries, principally in the USA and Britain.

  It’s an archetypal Victorian rags-to-riches story and a classic tale of the American dream. Born in 1835 in Dunfermline in Fife, Carnegie was the son of a weaver. The family was poor, and Andrew’s father struggled to find work when the steam-powered loom arrived and took business away from the hand-loom weavers. So they took a gamble, borrowed money for the passage, and father, mother and two sons emigrated to America in 1848 and settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie supported the building of more than 3,000 public libraries

  From that day forward, twelve-year-old Andrew worked and worked and worked, pulling himself up by the bootstraps through a series of jobs, starting as bobbin boy in the same cotton factory where his father found work. Then he became a messenger boy in the Pittsburgh telegraph office, doing everything he could to get ahead, including memorizing the city’s street lay-out and the names and addresses of the important people he delivered to.

  The only formal education Andrew Carnegie had was three or four years at a small school in Dunfermline, but throughout his life he was passionate about education. He attended night classes when he could, and when he delivered telegrams to the theatre he used to stay on and watch the plays.

  And he read. Books were his passport to educating himself and making his way in the world. In his autobiography he paid tribute to a Pittsburgh gentleman called Colonel Anderson, who had a private library of about 400 books which he would open to local boys every weekend and let them borrow any book they wanted. This generosity stayed with Carnegie throughout his rise to power and wealth, and inspired his own library philanthropy. ‘Only he who has longed as I did for Saturdays to come,’ he wrote later, ‘can understand what Colonel Anderson did for me and the boys of Allegheny. Is it any wonder that I resolved if ever surplus wealth came to me, I would use it imitating my benefactor?’ He gifted his first library to his home town of Dunfermline. Carnegie gave £8,000 for the building, his mother laid the foundation stone, and it opened in 1883. It was an instant success, and by the end of its first day it had issued more than 2,000 books. This was the pattern that Carnegie followed through the years: he would build and equip the library, but the deal was that the local authority had to match that by providing the land, and coming up with the budget for operation and maintenance. He wasn’t just handing out money willy-nilly; he wanted the state to take on the library after he made it possible. And as a further condition to funding, local councils had to adopt the Public Libraries Acts, which, from 1850, gave local councils the power to establish free public libraries. To Carnegie this was practical philanthropism, not charity: ‘I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people,’ he said, ‘because they only help those who help themselves. They never pauperise, a taste for reading drives out lower tastes.’

  He continued to endow libraries across America and all over Britain and beyond: $500,000 in 1885 to Pittsburgh for a public library; $250,000 to Allegheny City for a music hall and library; $250,000 to Edinburgh for a free library. In total Carnegie funded some 3,000 libraries, more than 600 in Britain and Ireland, and nearly three times that number in the US.

  Not bad for a boy from Fife.

  Penny Dreadful to Thumb Novel

  ‘Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait’

  (Wilkie Collins)

  Wander down any street in Japan, travel on public transport there, and you’ll notice something remarkable: The thumb tribe – oyayubizoku – are at work: Japanese teenagers typing constantly on their mobile phones, communicating in text and, most recently, reading and telling stories in the form of so-called thumb novels. Lurid romantic fictions are tapped out in instalments by novice authors and devoured by mostly young and female mobile-phone users.

  It’s a form of writing which sits happily with the publishing phenomenon of serialized fiction, which, arguably, marked the beginning of society’s first mass popular culture. The popularity of the novel in instalments amongst the working classes went hand-in-hand with developments in printing and an increase in mass literacy rates in the nineteenth century. All the great Victorian novelists, including George Eliot, William Thackeray and Joseph Conrad, published their newest works of fiction in instalments, but the undoubted genius of the format was that prodigious wordsmith Charles Dickens.

  Most of Dickens’ working-class readers couldn’t afford the price of a full-length novel, so he published the bulk of his major novels in monthly or weekly instalments which could be bought for a shilling. Many of the instalments ended with a cliff-hanger, ensuring the sales of the next one. Sales of copies of his first serialized novel, The Pickwick Papers, in 1836 went from 1,000 for the first edition to 40,000 for the final instalment. Brimming with memorable characters, strong narrative, acute observation, comedy, villainy and tragedy – all the Dickens trademarks – The Pickwick Papers became one of the most successful novels of its time and thrust the twenty-four-year-old author into literary stardom.

  Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers was serialized and each edition sold for just a shilling

  Dickens’ writings appealed to people across the social spectrum, and due to the new technological advances in publishing and transport he could reach a reading public of unprecedented size. His serialized novels were so gripping, so entertaining, that when he published The Old Curiosity Shop in instalments between 1840 and 1841, weekly sales rose to 100,000. As it reached its climax – the death of Little Nell – Dickens was inundated with letters begging him not to kill her off. It’s said that when English ships docked in New York, crowds filled the piers, shouting ‘Is Little Nell dead?’ Nell’s death scene caused even grown men to cry. Dickens’ associate, the Scottish judge Lord Jeffrey, was apparently found openly weeping and confessed, ‘I’m a great goose to have given way so, but I couldn’t help it.’

  Penny dreadful stories were full of violence, gore and crime

  Cheaper alternatives to the serial story began to be published in England around the same time Dickens was writing. The ‘penny dreadful’, or ‘penny blood’ or even ‘penny awful’ were serialized stories of sensational fiction, full of violence, gore, crime and horror, vampires, monsters and ladies in distress. The infamous Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber, made his literary debut in a penny dreadful serial called The String of Pearls: A Romance in 1846. Printed on eight pages of cheap paper and sold for a penny, the bloods were aimed at working-class adults, although eventually the readership became almost exclusively boys.

  The dime novel was the American equivalent to t
he penny dreadful

  The dime novel was the penny dreadful’s equivalent in the United States. The adventures of the American frontier characters such as Calamity Jane, Deadwood Dick and Wild Bill Hickok were the precursors of the first Western novels. The penny dreadfuls were formulaic and lurid, churned out by a string of mostly hack writers – what we might call pulp fiction today – but they offered a kind of written storytelling with a deep, widespread appeal. English writer G. K. Chesterton explained the attraction: ‘My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world.’

  If the serialized novels of Dickens and the penny dreadfuls are the television of the nineteenth century, then what are we to make of the latest innovation in novel writing of the twentieth-first century?

  Take a subway in any Japanese city and you’ll notice most of the young people glued to their mobile phones. They’re not making phone calls – Japanese etiquette frowns upon talking on public transport; they may be text messaging; but an awful lot of them will be using their flip-top mobiles to compose, share or read a new literary art form – the keitai shousetsu, or mobile-phone novel. In a country where an entire generation has grown up using mobile phones to communicate, watch TV and films, shop and surf the internet, writing thumb novels on the keypad is the obvious next step. Just as Dickens published his novels in instalments, so the thumb novel chapters, often only 100 words long, are sent directly to the reader one by one. They’re downloaded from mobile-phone novel sites, the largest of which, Maho i-Land, has 6 million members and more than a million titles. The stories are mostly romantic fiction with racy storylines involving rape, pregnancy and, of course, love. The thumb novels are often in diary or confessional form, heavy on dialogue and short paragraphs and liberally sprinkled with slang and emoticons. They tend to be written by novices and read by teenage girls and young women – although the first one of its kind was actually thumbed by ‘Yoshi’, a Tokyo man in his mid-thirties. ‘Yoshi’ (thumb novelists nearly always use pseudonyms) set up a website in 2000 and began posting instalments of his novel Deep Love, a lurid tale of prostitution, Aids and suicide. It was so popular that it was published in book form, selling 2.6 million copies; a spin-off TV series, manga and movie have followed.