The Beginnings of Libraries

by Ernest Cushing Richardson

(b) Phonetic

(aa) verbal

(bb) syllabic

(cc) (consonantal)

(dd) alphabetic

For each of these kinds of “written” records there is a corresponding kind of library or record collection.

The question of the order of evolution among these various kinds of record collections is closely bound up with that of the evolution of language and handwriting, the very invention of handwriting probably implying a feeling of need for kept records.

The commonly recognized ways of human utterance are gesture and oral speech—the one appealing to the eye, the other to the ear, and each leaving its record probably at different points and in different molecular form in the brain. Hand gesture came in course of time to be the highest type of gesture language, evolving as it did into a highly complex and adaptable type of language, and modern hand writing is simply a form of hand gesture which, by means of ink or lead or chisel, or some other material or instrument, leaves a trail of the hand movement in permanent record.

The question whether gesture language preceded sound language may perhaps be settled by the answer to the question whether in the evolution of living beings the eye preceded the ear. If in the age of reptiles one saw the other glide or the grass move before he heard a swish or hiss, and if he himself first stayed still in order to escape being seen rather than heard, then doubtless gesture language began before sound language, and doubtless again also language began among men with simple gestures rather than simple cries. The biologists say in fact that reaction to light came earlier than reaction to sound, eye before ear, and if this is true, gesture language doubtless preceded oral speech. But, however it may be about simple utterance, when it comes to the matter of permanent external documentary record of utterance, it is clear enough that the records of gesture preceded the records of sound, and for some six thousand or eight thousand years, more or less up to yesterday, the only permanent records, or records in external material, were gesture records. Even phonetic writing, so called, is not sound record but a record of sounds translated into gestures; writing is a gesture sign which stands for a sound, not a record of sound. It is only within our own generation that, through the invention of the phonograph, oral or other sound utterance has been recorded in permanent material and libraries of sound records made possible.

The written recording of even signs for sounds did, however, in the evolution of record keeping mark a very decided advance over all previous methods. It was as great an advance perhaps as articulate speech itself is over gesture language or pantomime, and even greater than the next great step in human evolution, the invention of alphabetic writing. It was certainly a longer step in time from the very first beginnings up to this point than from here to the alphabet, perhaps longer than from 3400 B.C. to 1913 A.D., and the period of premnemonic record collections, therefore, it may be said in all seriousness, is perhaps longer than all later periods of library history put together.