A.D. 1517. At Clairvaux: in the cloister are 14 studies, where the monks write and study, and over it the new library, 180 feet long by 17 wide (probably this narrowness followed the shape of the cloister) with 48 benches, “excellently lighted on both sides by large windows.”
It will be noted that these bookshelves were about four feet “on centers,” and that great emphasis was laid on ample daylight.
From the thirteenth century comes this warning for us—“the press in which books are kept ought to be lined inside with wood that the damp of the walls may not moisten or stain them,” which is singularly like a caution in a recent American manual against leaving unpainted brick walls at the back of wall cases.
It seems singular that wall shelving, which was certainly used in Assyrian libraries and in the classical period, disappears in the monkish era and yields to “presses” or closed bookcases; to appear as a new device in the library of the Escorial in Spain in the year 1583. Sir Christopher Wren thought so much of this feature that he followed it in Trinity College (Cambridge) library in 1695, saying, “The disposition of the shelves both along the walls and breaking out from the walls must prove very convenient and gracefull: A little square table in each cell with two seats.”
The fifteenth century had been a library era throughout. In the sixteenth came the Reformation, which swept away “papistical” libraries. More than eight hundred libraries of monastic orders, in England alone, were dispersed or destroyed by this iconoclastic whirlwind. In 1540 the only libraries left were at Oxford and Cambridge and in the cathedrals. But at the same time, the invention and rapid spread of printing had superseded the slow processes of making manuscript books, and had opened a new life for libraries. The first library built under these new conditions was that of St. John’s College, which brought over from the monastic and early college era the alcove arrangement.
The renaissance of wall shelving spread rapidly. Compared with the chaining of books to the shelves, which it superseded, it was an open-access reform. To quote Cardinal Mazarin’s library motto, “Publice patere voluit.” It was quickly followed in France, but more slowly in England. In 1610 this form of shelving with a gallery was adopted in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (see illustration on p. 275 of Clark), the progenitor of our first distinctive American library interiors, now discredited and almost abandoned.
Modern History
From the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, there is little to chronicle in the evolution of the library building. What libraries were built or altered followed either the monastic-collegiate alcove style, or the Escorial-Trinity wall shelving and gallery, or both. The best illustrations of libraries of this era are still extant at Oxford and Cambridge. A view of what he calls the oldest example of the combination of high wall shelving broken by a gallery, with the older fashion of alcoves, as they still exist at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, is shown by Duff-Brown on p. 2. A fine specimen may be seen at Trinity College, Dublin, interesting because of two modern attempts to burst the confines of old walls: first, as shown in the traces of sliding cases long antedating those of the British Museum; second, in the two-story wooden stack recently installed and already outgrown, in the cloisters below the library, which were originally open but were glassed in to protect the stack. (See illustrations, reproducing photographs taken by the author.[5])
The first appearance of the floor case, the precedent of the modern stack, appears in the library of the University of Leyden in 1610, of which a large illustration is given by Clark[6] and a smaller one by Fletcher.[7] Here is seen the utilization of the whole floor of a book room through parallel cases evidently open to access, although the books are all chained. The library is lofty and the shelves lighted not directly from stack-windows, but by chapel windows high in the wall, which appear to fill the room with ample diffused light. Some of the “broad-brims” pacing the floor may have been our Pilgrim ancestors, who, for the ten years subsequent to the date of this picture, were living at Leyden and frequenting the University.