Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography

by Richard Garnett

"And so," he continues, "accordingly sought after and valued in that regard and not in regard of the service which is to be done by them unto the Commonwealth of Israel. For the most part men look after the maintenance and livelihood settled upon their places more than upon the end and usefulness of their employments. They seek themselves and not the public therein, and so they subordinate all the advantages of their places to purchase mainly two things thereby, viz., an easy subsistence and some credit in comparison of others, nor is the last much regarded if the first may be had. To speak in particular of library keepers in most universities that I know, nay, indeed, in all, their places are but mercenary, and their employment of little or no use further than to look to the books committed to their custody, that they may not be lost or embezzled by those that use them, and this is all."

Dury has, no doubt, here put his finger upon the main cause of the low condition of the librarianship of his day. The general conception of the librarian's functions was far too narrow. He was allowed no share in the government of his own library. He had not necessarily anything to do with the selection of new books, nor was it expected of him that he should advise and direct the studies of those resorting to the collections committed to his care. In fact he was not usually qualified for such activity, or even for the minor task of making these collections serviceable by means of catalogues and indexes. The development

of literature had advanced so far as to necessitate the library custodian, but had not yet produced the library administrator—the Denis and Audiffredi of the succeeding century. Dury saw this, and also saw that the ideal librarian he had conceived in his own mind would need better pay that he might do better work. One exception to his apparently sweeping statements must be noted. Bodley's librarians in the seventeenth century were undoubtedly men of high literary distinction. Yet even here the arrangements for the librarian's remuneration were unsatisfactory, and wrong in principle.

"I have been informed," says Dury, "that in Oxford the settled maintenance of the library keeper is not above fifty or sixty pounds per annum, but that it is accidentally viis et modis, sometimes worth a hundred pound. What the accidents are, and the ways and means by which they come, I have not been curious to search after."

So we are not to know by what shifts Mr. Nicholson's seventeenth-century predecessor mended his salary. "Hay and oats," says Dean Swift, "in the hands of a skilful groom will make excellent wine, as well as ale, but this I only hint."

Dury now proceeds to develop his ideas in a fine and wise passage:—

"I have thought that if the proper employments of library keepers were taken into consideration as they are, or may be made useful to the advancement of learning; and were ordered and maintained

proportionately to the ends which ought to be intended thereby, they would be of exceeding great use to all scholars, and have an universal influence upon all the parts of learning, to produce and propagate the same into perfection. For if library keepers did understand themselves in the nature of their work, and would make themselves, as they ought to be, useful in their places in a public way, they ought to become agents for the advancement of universal learning; and to this effect I could wish that their places might not be made, as everywhere they are, mercenary, but rather honorary; and that with the competent allowance of two hundred pounds a year [equivalent to about six hundred nowadays], some employments should be put upon them further than a bare keeping of the books. It is true that a fair library is not only an adornment and credit to the place where it is, but an useful commodity by itself to the public; yet in effect it is no more than a dead body as now it is constituted, in comparison of what it might be, if it were animated with a public spirit to keep and use it, and ordered as it might be for public service. For if such an allowance were settled upon the employment as might maintain a man of parts and generous thoughts, then a condition might be annexed to the bestowing of the place; that none should be called thereunto but such as had approved themselves zealous and profitable in some public ways of learning to advance the same, or that should be bound to certain tasks to be prosecuted towards that end, whereof

a list might be made, and the way to try their abilities in prosecuting the same should be described, lest in after times unprofitable men creep into the place to frustrate the public of the benefit intended by the donors towards posterity. The proper charge, then, of the honorary library keeper in a university should be thought upon, and the end of that employment, in my conception, is to keep the public stock of learning, which is in books and manuscripts; to increase it, and to propose it to others in the way which may be most useful unto all; his work, then, is to be a factor and trader for helps to learning, and a treasurer to keep them, and a dispenser to apply them to use, or to see them well used, or at least not abused."