At the edge of Brockwell Park in leafy south London, there stands a heavy granite cattle trough. Deeply engraved on its sides are the words Metropolitan Drinking Fountain & Cattle Trough Association.
Where cattle and horses once slaked their thirst (there’s a lower basin for dogs), flowers now bloom. This trough stands like the Victorian equivalent of a redundant petrol station.
Its very solidity is a symbol of confidence that its function would be long-lasting, in the same way as a Carnegie library made a bold public statement of the importance of the book as a gateway to knowledge and self-help.
In his perceptive introduction to Libraries Within the Library, David Pearson, the City of London’s director of libraries and archives, notes that the notion of the book, and access to the information it contains, is fast.
The technology exists, he argues, to create “a world whose entire documentary heritage has been digitised”. In such a world, the book’s role as a storehouse and transmitter of information could soon be redundant.
In this context the book, as we know it, would no longer be a primary source of information, but could itself become an object of study, for its own provenance, its history, its ownerships and annotations. Collections would become a source of information about their collectors, historical documents in their own right.
Librarians are recognising, as curators have done before them, that books have “historical and cultural meaning beyond their textual content”. Those school-era wrong-doings – writing in the margins, annotating and underlining – can give an insight into collectors, owners and readers.
I can’t pretend that Libraries Within the Library is a light read. It weighs in at 1.3 kg and is at times as densely written as its weight suggests. It frequently drove me to the dictionary and introduced me to a new vocabulary.
I particularly enjoyed an “incunabula with centripetal habits”, that is, a book published in the early days of printing (especially before 1501), which in this case kept returning to the British Museum, despite the best efforts to dispose of it as a duplicate – a bookish equivalent of the bad penny.
But scratch beneath the surface of the undoubted scholarship of the 19 essays that make up the bulk of this tome, and you glimpse a world far more interesting than you might have expected, populated by a host of characters – bibliophiles, cataloguers and detectives, tracking down missing bits of collections, often lost in those duplicate sales which were the feature of the early years of an underfunded British Museum.
And, above all, an array of collectors whose generous gifts of their lifetimes’ passion so enriched what is now the British Library.
As is so often the case, there are often only fleeting glimpses of some of this rich cast list – Robert Hooke, whose daily round took him from bookshop to coffee house, from auctions to the stalls of open-air traders; Dr Monro, the mad-doctor (the hyphen is important!); and John Caley, “the dilatory archivist”.
But fortunately of others there is more – Isaac Casaubon, the passionate collector of Hebrew texts; Hans Sloane, whose huge library included a collection of ephemera, which despite being severely diminished by loss, still provides a fascinating insight into Stuart and Georgian social history.
And then there is George Thomason, whose rigorous chronological arrangement of his collection of 22,000 items in over 2,000 volumes, has made it a “browser’s delight”; the great naturalist and bibliophile, Joseph Banks; and the wonderfully named Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode, who, on his death in 1799, left the nation his “incomparable collections of books and prints, richly evocative of a certain fashion in English bibliophilia and taste”.
Like Thomason’s collection, this book is also “a browser’s delight”, but it is also revealing of a new approach to librarianship and a fresh way of looking at books in a post-Google world. There’s life in the old book yet.
Timothy Mason is an arts and heritage consultant
Where cattle and horses once slaked their thirst (there’s a lower basin for dogs), flowers now bloom. This trough stands like the Victorian equivalent of a redundant petrol station.
Its very solidity is a symbol of confidence that its function would be long-lasting, in the same way as a Carnegie library made a bold public statement of the importance of the book as a gateway to knowledge and self-help.
In his perceptive introduction to Libraries Within the Library, David Pearson, the City of London’s director of libraries and archives, notes that the notion of the book, and access to the information it contains, is fast.
The technology exists, he argues, to create “a world whose entire documentary heritage has been digitised”. In such a world, the book’s role as a storehouse and transmitter of information could soon be redundant.
In this context the book, as we know it, would no longer be a primary source of information, but could itself become an object of study, for its own provenance, its history, its ownerships and annotations. Collections would become a source of information about their collectors, historical documents in their own right.
Librarians are recognising, as curators have done before them, that books have “historical and cultural meaning beyond their textual content”. Those school-era wrong-doings – writing in the margins, annotating and underlining – can give an insight into collectors, owners and readers.
I can’t pretend that Libraries Within the Library is a light read. It weighs in at 1.3 kg and is at times as densely written as its weight suggests. It frequently drove me to the dictionary and introduced me to a new vocabulary.
I particularly enjoyed an “incunabula with centripetal habits”, that is, a book published in the early days of printing (especially before 1501), which in this case kept returning to the British Museum, despite the best efforts to dispose of it as a duplicate – a bookish equivalent of the bad penny.
But scratch beneath the surface of the undoubted scholarship of the 19 essays that make up the bulk of this tome, and you glimpse a world far more interesting than you might have expected, populated by a host of characters – bibliophiles, cataloguers and detectives, tracking down missing bits of collections, often lost in those duplicate sales which were the feature of the early years of an underfunded British Museum.
And, above all, an array of collectors whose generous gifts of their lifetimes’ passion so enriched what is now the British Library.
As is so often the case, there are often only fleeting glimpses of some of this rich cast list – Robert Hooke, whose daily round took him from bookshop to coffee house, from auctions to the stalls of open-air traders; Dr Monro, the mad-doctor (the hyphen is important!); and John Caley, “the dilatory archivist”.
But fortunately of others there is more – Isaac Casaubon, the passionate collector of Hebrew texts; Hans Sloane, whose huge library included a collection of ephemera, which despite being severely diminished by loss, still provides a fascinating insight into Stuart and Georgian social history.
And then there is George Thomason, whose rigorous chronological arrangement of his collection of 22,000 items in over 2,000 volumes, has made it a “browser’s delight”; the great naturalist and bibliophile, Joseph Banks; and the wonderfully named Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode, who, on his death in 1799, left the nation his “incomparable collections of books and prints, richly evocative of a certain fashion in English bibliophilia and taste”.
Like Thomason’s collection, this book is also “a browser’s delight”, but it is also revealing of a new approach to librarianship and a fresh way of looking at books in a post-Google world. There’s life in the old book yet.
Timothy Mason is an arts and heritage consultant
Edited by Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor, British Library, £45, ISBN 978 0 7123 5035 8
