CHAPTER I
LIBRARIES AND THEIR KINDS
Speech and Writing.
The two most important human inventions are perhaps Speech and Writing. In no adequate way could man fully express his mental activities except by speech: nor could he adequately record them except by writing. And to some extent the development of the two ran a parallel course, for just as early Speech is largely an imitation of natural sounds (Onomatopœia), so early Writing is probably, in the first instance, entirely from pictures (pictograms), which from the need of acceleration became worn down to simpler forms, and finally to letters; the sense similarly declining from the plain or derivative ideas arising from pictures, to mere syllables with no intrinsic meaning, and finally to simple sounds corresponding to letters. But even this latest stage was reached in the Valley of the Nile by, or not long after, 3000 B.C., as is testified by a stelè representing the cult of Send, a king of the second Egyptian Dynasty (now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford), in which the letters S, N, D occur in a cartouche; while in 1750 the North American Indians used pictograms, and the practice is not yet extinct, for we use the symbol ☞
Early Libraries.
As soon as Writing occurs in a portable form, whether as cylinders of baked clay in Assyria, or as tablets of bark, wood or wax, or as sheets of parchment or paper, there is a volume, and there is the possibility of a collection of books which forms a Library. The earliest library of which a plan can be reconstructed was discovered at Nineveh by Layard and dates from about 700 B.C. Of early Egyptian libraries no trace has been found; but under the Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies the great library at Alexandria in Egypt was founded about 285 B.C. About libraries in Greece information is very scant until the time of Euripides (fifth century B.C.) In Italy, the earliest public library was founded soon after 39 B.C. by C. Asinius Pollio, and under Augustus at least two more were instituted at Rome; and by the fourth century at least twenty-five or so were there erected, but all of them are stated to have been closed down, “bybliothecis sepulcrorum ritu in perpetuum clausis” (Ammianus Marcellinus). Of course these public libraries had been preceded by private collections, of which records are few and far between.
Before the second century B.C. the contents of Greek and Roman libraries were not books in the form to which we are accustomed, but rolls of papyrus, and the fittings of libraries were accordingly shelves with vertical divisions forming pigeon-holes, into which a roll or rolls were thrust. But the advantages of parchment as a material to bear writing were so obvious that the long rolls wrapped round a stick (rotuli) gave way gradually to the well-known form appropriate to parchment or paper, namely sewn and bound leaves (codices) either quarto—which was found at first to be the most convenient size—or folio or octavo. The receptacles in libraries (at Rome) were no longer pigeon-holes (nidi, foruli) or long narrow boxes (loculamenta), but undivided shelves (either fixed to the wall, pegmata, or standing against it, plutei). The wall space above these various forms of shelving was usually filled with decorative portraits or busts of great authors. Perhaps it is not accidental that in the great library collected by Sir Robert Cotton (now in the British Museum) the various parts were called (as they are still referred to) by the names of the Roman Emperors whose busts surmounted each division, and in the Bodleian, after the Civil War, the wall divisions of the Picture Gallery were surmounted by a series of ornamental medallions and portraits above the ordinary pictures on the walls. The books, whether disposed in regular book cases or in cupboards (armaria) with doors, were in Roman times laid on their side.
Mediæval Libraries.
The classical tradition concerning the care of books was apparently carried on with little change during the first five centuries of the Christian era. Ecclesiastical libraries were kept in churches, as classical libraries were usually connected with temples. It is usual to date the organization of mediæval collections from the Rule of St. Benedict in the sixth century; and the Order which he founded, with its direct offshoots, the Cluniacs, Carthusians and Cistercians, were foremost in assigning a place to literature in the daily duties of the monk. The gradual evolution of the library can be traced from the time when a few volumes could be accommodated in a press or presses in a recess or small room, usually at the north-east corner of the cloister near the chapter-house, to the fully developed collections of the fifteenth century, housed in a large separate room, which was almost always on the first floor, perhaps to avoid damp and to secure a good light.
The following figures will illustrate the size of some considerable mediæval libraries in various places and times.
| Date. | Place. | Volumes. |
|---|---|---|
| A.D. 831 | St. Riquier (French abbey) | 250 |
| 10th cent. | Bobbio (Italian monastery) | 700 |
| 12th cent. | Durham Cathedral | about 700 |
| 1300 | Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury | about 1850 |
| 1395 | Durham Cathedral | 921 |
| 1418 | Peterhouse, Cambridge | 380 |
| 1424 | University Library, Cambridge | 122 |
| 1472 | Queens’ College, Cambridge | 199 |
| 1473 | University Library, Cambridge | 330 |