Remarks on the practice and policy of lending Bodleian printed books and manuscripts

by Henry W. Chandler

Under the present system of administration, for which the Curators are responsible, the actual, and, it may be, the unavoidable wear and tear of books in the library itself, even in the choicer portions of it, is great enough to deter any man in the future from acting as Douce did in the past. The way in which very precious volumes are knocked about is plain enough to any one who visits the interior of the library as constantly as I do, and as all Curators are by statute empowered and even ordered to do. Readers are impatient, sometimes unreasonable; immense numbers of books can only be reached by means of ladders; the whole establishment is undermanned, and though the small staff does its best to protect the books, they are notwithstanding much bumped about. One consequence of this rough usage is that the standard of carefulness, as it may be called, is very naturally lowered, and as a further consequence the estimate of what constitutes damage is lowered in proportion.

There are many readers, or there certainly have been readers in the library, who have not hesitated to make marks in printed books and manuscripts. The man who will do such a thing as this in the library, will not hesitate to do it when he gets the book into his own possession. Now all avoidable wear and tear is so much real loss to the library, and detracts in that proportion from its utility. It may be useful to A or B to borrow books from the Bodleian, but it cannot be useful to the University or to future generations that the life of any book should be carelessly or needlessly abridged.

It will be admitted that no book can be in two places at the same time; if a volume is in the rooms of Mr. X or Mr. Y, it cannot at that moment be produced in the Bodleian should a reader happen to want it. One of the great advantages of such a library as the Bodleian, if it were properly administered, is that a visitor is sure to find the book which he comes to consult. This is perfectly well understood by such men as Mr. Watts (see above, p. 49); it was brought home to the mind of Niebuhr, and it has been one of the reasons why all lending has up to the present moment been most rigidly forbidden at the British Museum. In a library like the Bodleian, where the practice of lending prevails as it now does, a man may put himself to great inconvenience in order to visit it; he may even travel from Berlin, and when he arrives he may find that all his trouble has been in vain; the very book he wants is out: at the British Museum, where up to the present time knowledge and common sense have prevailed, every man is sure that he can at once get any book whatever that he finds in the catalogue. It is a thousand pities to destroy this confidence; one of the great uses of a library like ours disappears when things are so ill managed, and I believe that there are in the Bodleian men who could tell of some grievous disappointments caused by our modern laxity. I know very well that we shall be told that such cases are few and trivial: be it so. Who does not see that as the present practice extends, as extend it must, one of the great advantages of a grand library will at last vanish? Nothing can be more strictly useful to all real students than the absolute certainty of obtaining at once any book that can be found in the catalogue.

No limit seems to be placed on the borrower's powers; he may, for anything that appears to the contrary, have any number of books or manuscripts out. Now when we see the practice of more than one reader in the library, we may form a pretty shrewd guess of what men will do in the way of borrowing. I am well within the mark when I say that at least one hundred volumes have been ere now allowed out to one reader at a time.

The present Librarian has been trying, I believe, to check this morbid appetite for superfluous volumes; but it is not always an easy thing to root out a bad habit.

Any one who examines the slips in the various parts of the Bodleian, as I habitually do, will be struck by two things; the immense number of volumes had out by the same reader or readers, and the length of time that volumes are allowed to remain off the shelves; and this is in great measure the fault of a system for which we are answerable. What takes place in the library will undoubtedly sooner or later take place out of it. A borrower is not, so far as I know, limited as to the number of volumes he may have out; neither is he limited as to the time he may keep them out. The present Librarian informed me that when he came into office he found that one book had been out of the library for nine years, and that others had been off the shelves for very long periods of time. And such things must happen, if you sanction this wretched system of lending. It is perfectly easy to do what constant experience has shown to entail on the whole the minimum of evil; it is easy to keep your books within the library as they do at the British Museum; but if you once lend, there is no drawing of lines possible. Altogether there are about one hundred and eleven persons on the borrowers' list already. It is said that the Curators can refuse any application if they choose; of course they can, but as a matter of fact no application ever has been refused, and every name added will make it more and more difficult, more and more invidious to refuse any one. Every Oxford resident is potentially on the list, and he may be actually on it whenever he likes. What is this but the beginning, and something more than the beginning, of that wretched system which Mr. Bradshaw speaks of above? (p. 50.) The dissolution of our magnificent library is already insidiously begun; and why is all this gratuitous and irreparable mischief to be done? why is that vast storehouse intended for the use and benefit of generation after generation of scholars to be scattered and at last destroyed? Simply to gratify the vulgar, selfish convenience of this or that individual regardless of the general good. The whole is to be sacrificed for a part, and for what a part! The present Librarian has been trying to do something to check this disastrous and ruinous practice, but the Curators are responsible for it, not the Librarian.

Manuscripts and printed books when lent out of Oxford are as a rule not lent to private houses but deposited in some library. What happens abroad I do not know, though I confess to having my suspicions. If a manuscript were lent to some one in a Cathedral town, it would be deposited in the Cathedral library; and we comfort ourselves with the belief that in such a place it would be secure, and that it would not on any account be removed from that library elsewhere. An acquaintance of my own, a very safe man, has had a Bodleian manuscript of great value out for some years, and it is lent not to him directly, but to a library where alone he is to use it. It may be that this arrangement is actually carried out, and I do not know that it is not, yet I would bet five pounds to a penny that if I went to his house I should find the Bodleian book kicking about in his study, where, in fact, though exposed to a thousand risks of damage and even destruction, it is really safer than in the library where we suppose it to be. For one Cathedral library I can answer: a book would hardly be safer there than it would be on a public and unwatched book-stall, and such I have no doubt whatever is the case with more than half the places to which we send books for safe custody. There is as little conscience about books in this stupid and wicked world as there is about umbrellas, and one of the most important and most useful functions of a body like the Curators of the Bodleian is to set up a high standard in such matters. It is our duty as trustees to take lofty ground, and to be sensitive where the world is listless and careless; and even if we do not really feel exactly as we ought, we are bound, like Gertrude, to 'assume a virtue though we have it not'; it is very laudable hypocrisy if the real article cannot be had. Yet I hope that it can, and that upon consideration we may all see that the convenience of a few is not for a moment to be compared with the convenience of many, and that we shall awake to the fact that we, of all people, ought not to countenance in any way whatever any practice which may tend in the remotest degree to damage the only institution in Oxford of which any rational being can in the present day be justly proud.

Lending of books has many more evil consequences, proximate and remote, than I have enumerated; but there is one which at the risk of being tedious must be mentioned. The glorious part of the Bodleian, the part contributed by Bodley himself, by Laud, by Selden, Pembroke, Digby, Roe, Rawlinson, &c., consists largely of gifts. Every man who knows anything at all about books, every one who loves them, is perfectly well aware that very few men will bequeath their libraries to an institution which emulates the American or the English circulating and commercial establishment. Barlow knew this, Bradshaw knew it (see above, p. 50); every one knows it, who has the least acquaintance with the habits and peculiarities of collectors. The Bodleian has to my certain knowledge already lost very rare books indeed which it might have had, but for this penny-wise and pound-foolish policy. Neither Rawlinson nor Douce would ever have been such fools as to leave us what they did, could they have foreseen how little sense of our duties and of our interests we have shown. Bodley over and over again, and in the strongest terms, forbad the lending of his books; Selden's executors only delivered his books to us on the express condition that they never should under any circumstances be lent; Laud stipulated that his books should not be lent, except for one particular purpose and in one particular way. The Bodleian is what it is, because till quite recent times we adhered to the rule of common sense, not to say to that of common honesty, and it is ever to be regretted that we departed from a course which was at once safe and honourable. There will be no more Douces, no more Rawlinsons, until we have returned to better ways and proved the sincerity of our repentance. I have heard it maintained that the days of great benefactors are over, that in some way not explained men's characters and habits have changed. I cannot admit this; men are now what they always were, and collectors in all ages are singularly alike. Only let us be as prudent, as worldly wise, and, I will add, as honest as our predecessors were, and there is no reason why the munificent benefactors of the past should not be rivalled by equally munificent benefactors in the future. Mr. Bradshaw (above, p. 50) is decidedly of opinion that carelessness with regard to books prevents benefactions, and that care attracts them. Barlow is of the same mind, and indeed the thing is too obvious to be insisted on. It is only those who know little or nothing of the feelings which actuate the real lovers of books who doubt about such very simple facts as these.

To conclude this part of the subject; the arguments against the lending of books out of such a library as the Bodleian may be briefly summed up thus: lending is bad, because books are necessarily exposed to needless and certain risks of damage and of downright loss; because one of the great ends served by a large library is defeated, in that no man can be certain of obtaining a book known to be in it; because lending leads sooner or later to the destruction of a library; because it dries up the great sources from which large numbers of the most valuable books are derived; because it is disapproved of by all those who have the largest and widest experience of books and their management; because, finally, it is in violation of the express directions of Bodley, of Selden, of Laud and others, and almost certainly contrary to the wishes of all our great benefactors, even though they may not have said as much. Reason and authority are equally against it; and the cause of learning and of literature can never be permanently served by a practice which tends to destroy that without which learning and literature alike are impossible: whatever advantages may seem to attend it, are more than counterbalanced by disadvantages so great, that none but those who recklessly sacrifice the future to the present, the interests of generations yet to come, to the selfishness of the generation that now is, can regard it with any favour or even with common patience. We have by the sturdy honesty of our predecessors received a vast treasure which they carefully preserved intact; we are its guardians and trustees, and we are bound in honour and honesty to hand on to our successors, undiminished and unimpaired, what we have received only as a trust, not as a something which we may spend or destroy at our pleasure. Any wilful act of ours which tends, however remotely, to damage the Bodleian Library is not only a scandalous breach of duty, but a crime against learning itself, in which I for one will have no part or share.

BAXTER, PRINTER, OXFORD.