Library: An Unquiet History

170 Pages·2004·1.76 MB·English

by  Matthew Battles

Library
AN UNQUIET HISTORY

Matthew Battles

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK • LONDON
Copyright © 2003 by Mathew Battles

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Battles, Matthew.
Library : an unquiet history / by Matthew Battles.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-393-02029-0

1. Libraries—History. 2. Libraries and society—History. 3. Books—History. I. Title. Z721.B28 2003
027’.009—dc21
2002156439

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1234567890
FOR MY FAMILY
and
FOR KEN CARPENTER
Keeper of Books
Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. READING THE LIBRARY
2. BURNING ALEXANDRIA
3. THE HOUSE OF WISDOM
4. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
5. BOOKS FOR ALL
6. KNOWLEDGE ON FIRE
7. LOST IN THE STACKS
NOTES ON SOURCES
Acknowledgments

My gratitude tells the story of the writing of this book: I am indebted first to
Donovan Hohn, gifted writer, genius editor, and good friend, who during his
time at Harper’s managed to cobble a serviceable magazine article from the
hundred or so rambling emails I sent him; I am grateful for his perseverance, his
taste, and his good faith. Passages from that article (“Lost in the Stacks:The
Decline and Fall of the Universal Library,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2000),
in much different form, are scattered throughout this book. Parts of chapter 2
appeared in my article “Burning Isn’t the Only Way to Lose a Book,” a review of
The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (cited
elsewhere), which appeared in the April 13, 2000, issue of the London Review
of Books. I delivered a portion of chapter 2 as part of a talk for the History of
Libraries in the United States conference at the Library Company of
Philadelphia in April 2002. Susan Barry, my agent, persuaded me that the
aforementioned ramblings about the life of libraries might make the beginnings
of a book. She also helped me find my way to W. W. Norton and editor Alane
Salierno Mason, without whose guidance and judgment this book would have
gone off course at any number of points in its writing. Otto Sonntag, my copy
editor at Norton, faced the task of bringing my untamed manuscript to heel; his
efforts strengthened the book immeasurably. I’m also indebted to Ravi
Mirchandani, my editor at Heinemann in Britain, who offered his support, as
well as his genius for titles, long before we began work on the U.K. edition.
Thanks, too, to Nancy Fish of the Harvard Bookstore for sharing her wisdom on
title troubles.In Rome,I was grateful for the opportunity to lodge at the American
Academy, where I benefited as much from the remarkable company of the
fellows there as from the Academy’s happy proximity to the Vatican.Massimo
Ceresa,the Vatican Library’s reference librarian, provided both wisdom and
hospitality, and his students at the library school at the Vatican were generous
with their time and views on the world of the library in Europe. In London, my
wife’s cousin Althea Greenan, her companion Gavin, and their daughters played
host to me and my family for a delightful week in their East Dulwich flat. Good
friends and great writers James Parker and Joshua Glenn read numerous early
drafts; their patience and insight was crucial to me. I owe a great debt of
gratitude to all my colleagues and friends at Harvard, without whose
indefatigable diligence that university’s libraries would not thrive as they do.
Those librarians and staff have been the true faculty of my own private
postgraduate course in library studies. I’m particularly indebted to Peter
Accardo, Anna Arthur, and Marek Kornilowicz for their friendship and insights;
to András Riedlmayer for his patient and generous intelligence; to Librarian of
Houghton Library William P. Stoneman; and especially to Kenneth Carpenter, a
librarian and scholar of great and generous sagacity, who mentored me in my
first two years of library work and whose guidance continues to brighten my
professional life. My greatest thanks, of course, goes to my family, both by birth
and by marriage, whose support and love are a constant revelation. And
especially I thank my wife, Rebekah Schlesinger, who let me mumble her off to
sleep with numerous drafts, and who as I write these words is outside allowing
herself to be soaked with waterguns, drawing fire and giving cover, once again,
to my writing.
CHAPTER ONE

Reading the Library

The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the
reasonable (or even humble and pure coherence) is a miraculous exception.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Library of Babel”

W
hen I first went to work in Harvard’s Widener Library, I immediately made
my first mistake: I tried to read the books. I quickly came to know the
compulsive vertigo that Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant, prowling the
fictionalized Widener stacks, felt in the novel Of Time and the River:
Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of
a thousand shelves and reading them like a madman. The thought of these
vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he
seemed to know—the greater the number of the books he read, the greater
the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read
would seem to be.... He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the
ten thousands. . . . [T]he thought that other books were waiting for him tore
at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book
as from a fowl.

Gant’s histrionics are a response to the contradictions anyone faces in the library.
As the reader gropes the stacks—lifting books and testing their heft, appraising
the fall of letterforms on the title page, scrutinizing marks left by other readers—
the more elusive knowledge itself becomes. All that remains unknown seems to
beckon from among the covers, between the lines. In the library, the reader is
wakened from the dream of communion with a single book, startled into a
recognition of the word’s materiality by the sheer number of bound volumes; by
the sound of pages turning, covers rubbing; by the rank smell of books gathered
together in vast numbers. Of course, the experience of the physicality of the
book is strongest in the large libraries, where the accumulated weight of written
words seems to exert a gravity all its own. And fewer libraries are larger than