Book review: The Meaning of the Library
Crawford, Alice (editor): The meaning of the library: a cultural history (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)
Alice Crawford from our Digital Research Division edited a book of collected essay from the King James Lecture series. Below is a review of the essays by our University Librarian & Director of Library Services, John MacColl. Borrow a copy.
A modest deposit of a quantity of books from the court of King James VI of Scotland, in 1612, leads here, to this wonderful collection of essays on the place of the library in culture, inflected by a variety of perspectives – literary, historical and sociological – from a group of the most eminent thinkers on book history, librarianship and scholarship in our time. It was that royal deposit that created in the University of St Andrews its first ‘common library’, a library for all three of the then quite separate colleges to use. Still in use today, the longest established continually functioning academic library in Scotland, the room that we now call the ‘King James Library’ celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2012. To celebrate that impending milestone, in 2009 Alice Crawford – now our Digital Humanities Research Librarian – and my predecessor as University Librarian, Jon Purcell, launched a series of lectures, the King James Library lectures. This series, consisting of 11 lectures in total, concluded in 2013.
As current University Librarian I am very proud that this excellent collection of essays celebrating libraries and their importance to humanity and to scholarly endeavour is rooted here, in this tiny town, the result of the aspiration of an early modern Scottish monarch to elevate the country’s original university through the proper care and collection of essential texts. Books were still expensive items in the early 17th century, though not as expensive as in the earliest days of print. Andrew Pettegree – one of three contributors from this University (the others being David Allan and Robert Crawford) – in ‘The Renaissance library and the challenge of print’, tells us that a Gutenberg bible in 1460 would have been the same price as a small townhouse.
The collection examines library meaning and developments along three axes: the historical, the imaginative and in contemporary understanding. Libraries were not always considered as uniformly positive. Edith Hall’s examination of Greek and Roman libraries talks of how they could both liberate and oppress; they could have a stultifying effect on creativity. Andrew Pettegree writes also of the harm inflicted by 19th century librarians on the historical understanding of reading habits by their compartmentalisation of literature, and their unstitching of bindings of bundled works in order to deliver the discrete parts to different reading rooms, something he describes as ‘well-meaning vandalism’.
Richard Gameson reflects on the symbolic and iconic power of the physical objects held by libraries – to this day still chosen by modern 21st century academics to convey in photographs their vocation as scholars, in preference to banks of computer screens. The persistent power of print is also picked up by Stephen Enniss, Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, a major special collections library, who is probably the best-equipped librarian in the world to talk about the collection of literary archives by modern libraries. His essay considers thoughtfully the issue of a market for literary manuscripts both historic and modern, the role that libraries should play in that market, and raises the question of what effect digital ‘manuscripts’ might have upon it.
In his account of Georgian libraries, David Allan points to the arrival of ‘permanent libraries’ for the common reader, at which point society decided it was valuable to retain public collections for perpetuity, complementing the academic library role as archive with a general commitment to the idea of national collections of all literary forms. Libraries hold the record of creativity in those multiple forms, and they, as they develop, muse on the library that contains them. This is particularly evident in Laura Marcus’s essay on the library in film, where she points out that Resnais’ 1956 film of the former Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Toute la mémoire du monde, suggests that the library is a time-machine that holds – in the contents of its books as perceived by all of their readers over time joined together – the single secret to the riddles of the universe, and to human happiness.
The non-librarian should not be deterred from this collection by any assumption that a book about libraries must be a dry read. The quality of the essayists ensures that we have some very entertaining writing. In his chapter on the book trade in pre-Revolutionary France, Robert Darnton presents us with Balzacian tales of intrigue and comedy in book smuggling. John Sutherland’s essay on 19th century libraries allows us to spend a wonderfully entertaining slice of time in the company of a bibliophile full of anecdotes from the period on libraries and the collections of writers. Robert Crawford is also entertaining on the place of libraries as written about and imagined by poets, with a strong biblio-erotic emphasis, and an account of the place of women in libraries, both as librarians and readers.
Marina Warner, in her essay on the library in fiction, moves fascinatingly from Gilgamesh to Borges, and in writing about the great Argentinian writer-librarian she muses on the role of the library in inspiring creativity: ‘The word is a coil in the battery of a book, and the library a huge generator.’ It is a theme Crawford also touches upon in reference to the modern British poet-librarians Philip Larkin and Douglas Dunn, the latter a Professor Emeritus in the School of English here, whose archive is now held in our Library’s Special Collections. It is also picked up by one of the foremost librarians of the digital age, John P. Wilkin, in his chapter on ‘Meanings of the library today’, who asserts – based on his experience in large US research libraries – that the research library is now engaged in developing a new function as publisher, alongside its traditional roles of curation, engagement with research and learning, and managing study space.
The concluding essay is by James Billington, who was still Librarian of Congress when he came to St Andrews to give the first King James Library lecture in 2009. In considering the role of libraries in preserving and advancing global democracy, he sums up in one short sentence an essential message that shines through each of the essays in this volume: ‘Libraries are places for the pursuit of truth.’ This is an inspiring encapsulation of our common endeavour as librarians working in and for those institutions of learning and research that serve scholars and the enquiring public.
John MacColl
University Librarian, University of St Andrews