Andrew Pettegree - The Library: A Fragile History

For the Dutch scholar Hugo Blotius, appointment as librarian to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II in 1575 should have been the crowning achievement of his career. Yet when Blotius arrived in Vienna to take up his new responsibilities, he found a scene of devastation. How neglected and desolate everything looked, he wrote, plaintively:

There was mould and rot everywhere, the debris of moths and bookworms, and a thick covering of cobwebs. The windows had not been opened for months, and not a ray of sunshine had penetrated through them to brighten the unfortunate books, which were slowly pining away: and when they were opened, what a cloud of noxious air streamed out.

This was the emperors court library, the Hofbibliothek, a collection of 7,379 volumes (Blotiuss first task was to make a catalogue); and it was situated not in the imperial palace but on the first floor of a Franciscan convent, a place of refuge for an orphaned collection which clearly played no part in the emperors cultural programme.

When Blotius arrived in Vienna, it was over a hundred years since the invention of printing, a technological marvel that would bring the joys of book ownership within the reach of many thousands of Europes citizens. Yet, in the midst of this great flourishing of literary culture, one of the principal libraries of Europe had become a dusty mausoleum. This was not an isolated example. The famed library of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, one of the wonders of the first great age of book collecting, was completely destroyed; the rare and precious books of Cosimo de Medici in Florence had been absorbed into other collections. The spectacular collection of Fernando Colon, son of the explorer Christopher Columbus, was intended to rival the fabled ancient library of Alexandria; but it too was also largely dispersed, ravaged by time, the disapproval of the Inquisition, and the depredations of the King of Spain.

The library of Duke Federico of Urbino, a collector so grand that it was said that he would allow no printed book to pollute his wondrous manuscripts, also fell into neglect. When the famous library scholar Gabriel Naud visited in the 1630s, he found Duke Federicos library in such a deplorable state that the readers despair of finding anything there. Naud was a young man on the rise, the author of one of the first guides for book collectors, aimed squarely at the elite buyers who might offer him a comfortable post building them a library (which they duly did). What Naud did not discuss in his writings was the uncomfortable truth of libraries throughout the ages: no society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations. What we will frequently see in this book is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artefacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows. The fate of many collections was to degrade in abandoned attics and ruined buildings, even if only as the prelude to renewal and rebirth in the most unexpected places.

If we leave Naud scrabbling around the faded glories of Italy and scroll forward 400 years, we find the library still going through an existential crisis of relevance, even if a collection of 7,000 volumes is a less remarkable achievement. Today, public libraries face falling budgets and the maintenance costs of old and decaying buildings, at the same time as demands for new services and declining interest in their legacy collections. During our research for this book, we witnessed at first hand the struggle over the Durning Public Library in Kennington, which Lambeth Council planned to turn into a community resource (council-speak for defunding it and allowing it to be run by volunteers). This ran into determined resistance from a group of local residents campaigning to keep it open. Does the campaign represent public-spirited altruism that we should applaud or is it a nostalgia for a world that has now disappeared and will never return? The educated and affluent part of our community takes it for granted that public funding of the arts and the facilitation of recreational reading is part of the core functions of government. But the public library in the sense of a funded collection available free to anyone who wants to use it has only existed since the mid nineteenth century, a mere fraction of the history of the library as a whole. If there is one lesson from the centuries-long story of the library, it is that libraries only last as long as people find them useful.

In other words, libraries need to adapt to survive, as they have always adapted to survive, a feat very successfully accomplished in recent years in France, with its network of Mdiathques, albeit with a huge commitment of public funds. University libraries, responding to student demand, are now social hubs as much as places of work, the cathedral silence that once characterised the library a thing of the past. In this, libraries actually hark back to an earlier model, pioneered in the Renaissance, when libraries were often convivial social spaces, in which books jostled for attention alongside paintings, sculptures, coins and curiosities.

This history of libraries does not offer a story of easy progress through the centuries, nor a prolonged lament for libraries lost: a repeating cycle of creation and dispersal, decay and reconstruction, turns out to be the historical norm. Even if libraries are cherished, the contents of these collections require constant curation, and often painful decisions about what has continuing value and what must be disposed of. Very often libraries flourished in the hands of their first owner, and then wasted away: damp, dust, moths and bookworm do far more damage over the years than the targeted destruction of libraries. But while growth and decline are parts of the cycle, so too is recovery. In 1556, the University of Oxford, its book collection despoiled, sold off the librarys furniture. Fifty years later Sir Thomas Bodley established the greatest university library of the next three centuries. Fire ravaged libraries with remarkable frequency, only for the collections to be rebuilt, more easily with each passing generation as the number of books available on the open market multiplied.