ON BOOKS AND THE HOUSING OF THEM
By William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898)
In the old age of his intellect (which at this point seemed to taste a
little of decrepitude), Strauss declared 1 that the
doctrine of immortality has recently lost the assistance of a passable
argument, inasmuch as it has been discovered that the stars are inhabited;
for where, he asks, could room now be found for such a multitude of souls?
Again, in view of the current estimates of prospective population for this
earth, some people have begun to entertain alarm for the probable
condition of England (if not Great Britain) when she gets (say) seventy
millions that are allotted to her against six or eight hundred millions
for the United States. We have heard in some systems of the pressure of
population upon food; but the idea of any pressure from any quarter upon
space is hardly yet familiar. Still, I suppose that many a reader must
have been struck with the naive simplicity of the hyperbole of St. John,
2
perhaps a solitary unit of its kind in the New Testament: “the which if
they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself
could not contain the books that should be written.”
A book, even Audubon (I believe the biggest known), is smaller than a man;
but, in relation to space, I entertain more proximate apprehension of
pressure upon available space from the book population than from the
numbers of mankind. We ought to recollect, with more of a realized
conception than we commonly attain to, that a book consists, like a man,
from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and a soul. They are not always
proportionate to each other. Nay, even the different members of the
book-body do not sing, but clash, when bindings of a profuse costliness
are imposed, as too often happens in the case of Bibles and books of
devotion, upon letter-press which is respectable journeyman’s work and
nothing more. The men of the Renascence had a truer sense of adaptation;
the age of jewelled bindings was also the age of illumination and of the
beautiful miniatura, which at an earlier stage meant side or margin art,3
and then, on account of the small portraitures included in it, gradually
slid into the modern sense of miniature. There is a caution which we ought
to carry with us more and more as we get in view of the coming period of
open book trade, and of demand practically boundless. Noble works ought
not to be printed in mean and worthless forms, and cheapness ought to be
limited by an instinctive sense and law of fitness. The binding of a book
is the dress with which it walks out into the world. The paper, type and
ink are the body, in which its soul is domiciled. And these three, soul,
body, and habilament, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one
another by the laws of harmony and good sense.
Already the increase of books is passing into geometrical progression. And
this is not a little remarkable when we bear in mind that in Great
Britain, of which I speak, while there is a vast supply of cheap works,
what are termed “new publications” issue from the press, for the most
part, at prices fabulously high, so that the class of real purchasers has
been extirpated, leaving behind as buyers only a few individuals who might
almost be counted on the fingers, while the effective circulation depends
upon middle-men through the engine of circulating libraries. These are not
so much owners as distributers of books, and they mitigate the difficulty
of dearness by subdividing the cost, and then selling such copies as are
still in decent condition at a large reduction. It is this state of
things, due, in my opinion, principally to the present form of the law of
copyright, which perhaps may have helped to make way for the satirical
(and sometimes untrue) remark that in times of distress or pressure men
make their first economies on their charities, and their second on their
books.
The annual arrivals at the Bodleian Library are, I believe, some twenty
thousand; at the British Museum, forty thousand, sheets of all kinds
included. Supposing three-fourths of these to be volumes, of one size or
another, and to require on the average an inch of shelf space, the result
will be that in every two years nearly a mile of new shelving will be
required to meet the wants of a single library. But, whatever may be the
present rate of growth, it is small in comparison with what it is likely
to become. The key of the question lies in the hands of the United Kingdom
and the United States jointly. In this matter there rests upon these two
Powers no small responsibility. They, with their vast range of inhabited
territory, and their unity of tongue, are masters of the world, which will
have to do as they do. When the Britains and America are fused into one
book market; when it is recognized that letters, which as to their
material and their aim are a high-soaring profession, as to their mere
remuneration are a trade; when artificial fetters are relaxed, and
printers, publishers, and authors obtain the reward which well-regulated
commerce would afford them, then let floors beware lest they crack, and
walls lest they bulge and burst, from the weight of books they will have
to carry and to confine.
It is plain, for one thing, that under the new state of things specialism,
in the future, must more and more abound. But specialism means subdivision
of labor; and with subdivision labor ought to be more completely, more
exactly, performed. Let us bow our heads to the inevitable; the day of
encyclopaedic learning has gone by. It may perhaps be said that that sun
set with Leibnitz. But as little learning is only dangerous when it
forgets that it is little, so specialism is only dangerous when it forgets
that it is special. When it encroaches on its betters, when it claims
exceptional certainty or honor, it is impertinent, and should be rebuked;
but it has its own honor in its own province, and is, in any case, to be
preferred to pretentious and flaunting sciolism.
A vast, even a bewildering prospect is before us, for evil or for good;
but for good, unless it be our own fault, far more than for evil. Books
require no eulogy from me; none could be permitted me, when they already
draw their testimonials from Cicero4 and Macaulay.5
But books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of
communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the
allies of the thought of man. They are in a certain sense at enmity with
the world. Their work is, at least, in the two higher compartments of our
threefold life. In a room well filled with them, no one has felt or can
feel solitary. Second to none, as friends to the individual, they are
first and foremost among the compages, the bonds and rivets of the race,
onward from that time when they were first written on the tablets of
Babylonia and Assyria, the rocks of Asia minor, and the monuments of
Egypt, down to the diamond editions of Mr. Pickering and Mr. Frowde.6
It is in truth difficult to assign dimensions for the libraries of the
future. And it is also a little touching to look back upon those of the
past. As the history of bodies cannot, in the long run, be separated from
the history of souls, I make no apology for saying a few words on the
libraries which once were, but which have passed away.
The time may be approaching when we shall be able to estimate the quantity
of book knowledge stored in the repositories of those empires which we
call prehistoric. For the present, no clear estimate even of the great
Alexandrian Libraries has been brought within the circle of popular
knowledge; but it seems pretty clear that the books they contained were
reckoned, at least in the aggregate, by hundreds of thousands.7
The form of the book, however, has gone through many variations; and we
moderns have a great advantage in the shape which the exterior has now
taken. It speaks to us symbolically by the title on its back, as the roll
of parchment could hardly do. It is established that in Roman times the
bad institution of slavery ministered to a system under which books were
multiplied by simultaneous copying in a room where a single person read
aloud in the hearing of many the volume to be reproduced, and that so
produced they were relatively cheap. Had they not been so, they would
hardly have been, as Horace represents them, among the habitual spoils of
the grocer.8
It is sad, and is suggestive of many inquiries, that this abundance was
followed, at least in the West, by a famine of more than a thousand years.
And it is hard, even after all allowances, to conceive that of all the
many manuscripts of Homer which Italy must have possessed we do not know
that a single parchment or papyrus was ever read by a single individual,
even in a convent, or even by a giant such as Dante, or as Thomas
Acquinas, the first of them unquestionably master of all the knowledge
that was within the compass of his age. There were, however, libraries
even in the West, formed by Charlemagne and by others after him. We are
told that Alcuin, in writing to the great monarch, spoke with longing of
the relative wealth of England in these precious estates. Mr. Edwards,
whom I have already quoted, mentions Charles the Fifth of France, in 1365,
as a collector of manuscripts. But some ten years back the Director of the
Bibliotheque Nationale informed me that the French King John collected
twelve hundred manuscripts, at that time an enormous library, out of which
several scores were among the treasures in his care. Mary of Medicis
appears to have amassed in the sixteenth century, probably with far less
effort, 5,800 volumes.9 Oxford had before that time
received noble gifts for her University Library. And we have to recollect
with shame and indignation that that institution was plundered and
destroyed by the Commissioners of the boy King Edward the Sixth, acting in
the name of the Reformation of Religion. Thus it happened that opportunity
was left to a private individual, the munificent Sir Thomas Bodley, to
attach an individual name to one of the famous libraries of the world. It
is interesting to learn that municipal bodies have a share in the honor
due to monasteries and sovereigns in the collection of books; for the
Common Council of Aix purchased books for a public library in 1419.10
Louis the Fourteenth, of evil memory, has at least this one good deed to
his credit, that he raised the Royal Library at Paris, founded two
centuries before, to 70,000 volumes. In 1791 it had 150,000 volumes. It
profited largely by the Revolution. The British Museum had only reached
115,000 when Panizzi became keeper in 1837. Nineteen years afterward he
left it with 560,000, a number which must now have more than doubled. By
his noble design for occupying the central quadrangle, a desert of gravel
until his time, he provided additional room for 1,200,000 volumes. All
this apparently enormous space for development is being eaten up with
fearful rapidity; and such is the greed of the splendid library that it
opens its jaws like Hades, and threatens shortly to expel the antiquities
from the building, and appropriate the places they adorn.
But the proper office of hasty retrospect in a paper like this is only to
enlarge by degrees, like the pupil of an eye, the reader’s contemplation
and estimate of the coming time, and to prepare him for some practical
suggestions of a very humble kind. So I take up again the thread of my
brief discourse. National libraries draw upon a purse which is bottomless.
But all public libraries are not national. And the case even of private
libraries is becoming, nay, has become, very serious for all who are
possessed by the inexorable spirit of collection, but whose ardor is
perplexed and qualified, or even baffled, by considerations springing from
the balance-sheet.
The purchase of a book is commonly supposed to end, even for the most
scrupulous customer, with the payment of the bookseller’s bill. But this
is a mere popular superstition. Such payment is not the last, but the
first term in a series of goodly length. If we wish to give to the block a
lease of life equal to that of the pages, the first condition is that it
should be bound. So at least one would have said half a century ago. But,
while books are in the most instances cheaper, binding, from causes which
I do not understand, is dearer, at least in England, than it was in my
early years, so that few can afford it.11 We have,
however, the tolerable and very useful expedient of cloth binding (now in
some danger, I fear, of losing its modesty through flaring ornamentation)
to console us. Well, then, bound or not, the book must of necessity be put
into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be
kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, should be
catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil! Unless indeed
things are to be as they now are in at least one princely mansion of this
country, where books, in thousands upon thousands, are jumbled together
with no more arrangement than a sack of coals; where not even the
sisterhood of consecutive volumes has been respected; where undoubtedly an
intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune take something from the
shelves that is a book; but where no particular book can except by the
purest accident, be found.
Such being the outlook, what are we to do with our books? Shall we be
buried under them like Tarpeia under the Sabine shields? Shall we renounce
them (many will, or will do worse, will keep to the most worthless part of
them) in our resentment against their more and more exacting demands?
Shall we sell and scatter them? as it is painful to see how often the
books of eminent men are ruthlessly, or at least unhappily, dispersed on
their decease. Without answering in detail, I shall assume that the
book-buyer is a book-lover, that his love is a tenacious, not a transitory
love, and that for him the question is how best to keep his books.
I pass over those conditions which are the most obvious, that the building
should be sound and dry, the apartment airy, and with abundant light. And
I dispose with a passing anathema of all such as would endeavour to solve
their problem, or at any rate compromise their difficulties, by setting
one row of books in front of another. I also freely admit that what we
have before us is not a choice between difficulty and no difficulty, but a
choice among difficulties.
The objects further to be contemplated in the bestowal of our books, so
far as I recollect, are three: economy, good arrangement, and
accessibility with the smallest possible expenditure of time.
In a private library, where the service of books is commonly to be
performed by the person desiring to use them, they ought to be assorted
and distributed according to subject. The case may be altogether different
where they have to be sent for and brought by an attendant. It is an
immense advantage to bring the eye in aid of the mind; to see within a
limited compass all the works that are accessible, in a given library, on
a given subject; and to have the power of dealing with them collectively
at a given spot, instead of hunting them up through an entire
accumulation. It must be admitted, however, that distribution by subjects
ought in some degree to be controlled by sizes. If everything on a given
subject, from folio down to 32mo, is to be brought locally together, there
will be an immense waste of space in the attempt to lodge objects of such
different sizes in one and the same bookcase. And this waste of space will
cripple us in the most serious manner, as will be seen with regard to the
conditions of economy and of accessibility. The three conditions are in
truth all connected together, but especially the two last named.
Even in a paper such as this the question of classification cannot
altogether be overlooked; but it is one more easy to open than to close—one
upon which I am not bold enough to hope for uniformity of opinion and of
practice. I set aside on the one hand the case of great public libraries,
which I leave to the experts of those establishments. And, at the other
end of the scale, in small private libraries the matter becomes easy or
even insignificant. In libraries of the medium scale, not too vast for
some amount of personal survey, some would multiply subdivision, and some
restrain it. An acute friend asks me under what and how many general
headings subjects should be classified in a library intended for practical
use and reading, and boldly answers by suggesting five classes only: (1)
science, (2) speculation, (3) art, (4) history, and (5) miscellaneous and
periodical literature. But this seemingly simple division at once raises
questions both of practical and of theoretic difficulty. As to the last,
periodical literature is fast attaining to such magnitude, that it may
require a classification of its own, and that the enumeration which
indexes supply, useful as it is, will not suffice. And I fear it is the
destiny of periodicals as such to carry down with them a large proportion
of what, in the phraseology of railways, would be called dead weight, as
compared with live weight. The limits of speculation would be most
difficult to draw. The diversities included under science would be so vast
as at once to make sub-classification a necessity. The ologies are by no
means well suited to rub shoulders together; and sciences must include
arts, which are but country cousins to them, or a new compartment must be
established for their accommodation. Once more, how to cope with the
everlasting difficulty of ‘Works’? In what category to place Dante,
Petrarch, Swedenborg, Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, or a hundred more? Where,
again, is Poetry to stand? I apprehend that it must take its place, the
first place without doubt, in Art; for while it is separated from Painting
and her other ‘sphere-born harmonious sisters’ by their greater dependence
on material forms they are all more inwardly and profoundly united in
their first and all-enfolding principle, which is to organize the
beautiful for presentation to the perceptions of man.
But underneath all particular criticism of this or that method of
classification will be found to lie a subtler question—whether the
arrangement of a library ought not in some degree to correspond with and
represent the mind of the man who forms it. For my own part, I plead
guilty, within certain limits, of favoritism in classification. I am
sensible that sympathy and its reverse have something to do with
determining in what company a book shall stand. And further, does there
not enter into the matter a principle of humanity to the authors
themselves? Ought we not to place them, so far as may be, in the
neighborhood which they would like? Their living manhoods are printed in
their works. Every reality, every tendency, endures. Eadem sequitur
tellure sepultos.
I fear that arrangement, to be good, must be troublesome. Subjects are
traversed by promiscuous assemblages of ‘works;’ both by sizes; and all by
languages. On the whole I conclude as follows. The mechanical perfection
of a library requires an alphabetical catalogue of the whole. But under
the shadow of this catalogue let there be as many living integers as
possible, for every well-chosen subdivision is a living integer and makes
the library more and more an organism. Among others I plead for individual
men as centres of subdivision: not only for Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, but
for Johnson, Scott, and Burns, and whatever represents a large and
manifold humanity.
The question of economy, for those who from necessity or choice consider
it at all, is a very serious one. It has been a fashion to make bookcases
highly ornamental. Now books want for and in themselves no ornament at
all. They are themselves the ornament. Just as shops need no ornament, and
no one will think of or care for any structural ornament, if the goods are
tastefully disposed in the shop-window. The man who looks for society in
his books will readily perceive that, in proportion as the face of his
bookcase is occupied by ornament, he loses that society; and conversely,
the more that face approximates to a sheet of bookbacks, the more of that
society he will enjoy. And so it is that three great advantages come hand
in hand, and, as will be seen, reach their maximum together: the
sociability of books, minimum of cost in providing for them, and ease of
access to them.
In order to attain these advantages, two conditions are fundamental.
First, the shelves must, as a rule, be fixed; secondly, the cases, or a
large part of them, should have their side against the wall, and thus,
projecting into the room for a convenient distance, they should be of
twice the depth needed for a single line of books, and should hold two
lines, one facing each way. Twelve inches is a fair and liberal depth for
two rows of octavos. The books are thus thrown into stalls, but stalls
after the manner of a stable, or of an old-fashioned coffee-room; not
after the manner of a bookstall, which, as times go, is no stall at all,
but simply a flat space made by putting some scraps of boarding together,
and covering them with books.
This method of dividing the longitudinal space by projections at right
angles to it, if not very frequently used, has long been known. A great
example of it is to be found in the noble library of Trinity College,
Cambridge, and is the work of Sir Christopher Wren. He has kept these
cases down to very moderate height, for he doubtless took into account
that great heights require long ladders, and that the fetching and use of
these greatly add to the time consumed in getting or in replacing a book.
On the other hand, the upper spaces of the walls are sacrificed, whereas
in Dublin, All Souls, and many other libraries the bookcases ascend very
high, and magnificent apartments walled with books may in this way be
constructed. Access may be had to the upper portions by galleries; but we
cannot have stairs all round the room, and even with one gallery of books
a room should not be more than from sixteen to eighteen feet high if we
are to act on the principle of bringing the largest possible number of
volumes into the smallest possible space. I am afraid it must be admitted
that we cannot have a noble and imposing spectacle, in a vast apartment,
without sacrificing economy and accessibility; and vice versa.
The projections should each have attached to them what I rudely term an
endpiece (for want of a better name), that is, a shallow and extremely
light adhering bookcase (light by reason of the shortness of the shelves),
which both increases the accommodation, and makes one short side as well
as the two long ones of the parallelopiped to present simply a face of
books with the lines of shelf, like threads, running between the rows.
The wall-spaces between the projections ought also to be turned to account
for shallow bookcases, so far as they are not occupied by windows. If the
width of the interval be two feet six, about sixteen inches of this may be
given to shallow cases placed against the wall.
Economy of space is in my view best attained by fixed shelves. This dictum
I will now endeavor to make good. If the shelves are movable, each shelf
imposes a dead weight on the structure of the bookcase, without doing
anything to support it. Hence it must be built with wood of considerable
mass, and the more considerable the mass of wood the greater are both the
space occupied and the ornament needed. When the shelf is fixed, it
contributes as a fastening to hold the parts of the bookcase together; and
a very long experience enables me to say that shelves of from half- to
three-quarters of an inch worked fast into uprights of from three-quarters
to a full inch will amply suffice for all sizes of books except large and
heavy folios, which would probably require a small, and only a small,
addition of thickness.
I have recommended that as a rule the shelves be fixed, and have given
reasons for the adoption of such a rule. I do not know whether it will
receive the sanction of authorities. And I make two admissions. First, it
requires that each person owning and arranging a library should have a
pretty accurate general knowledge of the sizes of his books. Secondly, it
may be expedient to introduce here and there, by way of exception, a
single movable shelf; and this, I believe, will be found to afford a
margin sufficient to meet occasional imperfections in the computation of
sizes. Subject to these remarks, I have considerable confidence in the
recommendation I have made.
I will now exhibit to my reader the practical effect of such arrangement,
in bringing great numbers of books within easy reach. Let each projection
be three feet long, twelve inches deep (ample for two faces of octavos),
and nine feet high, so that the upper shelf can be reached by the aid of a
wooden stool of two steps not more than twenty inches high, and portable
without the least effort in a single hand. I will suppose the wall space
available to be eight feet, and the projections, three in number, with end
pieces need only jut out three feet five, while narrow strips of bookcase
will run up the wall between the projections. Under these conditions, the
bookcases thus described will carry above 2,000 octavo volumes.
And a library forty feet long and twenty feet broad, amply lighted, having
some portion of the centre fitted with very low bookcases suited to serve
for some of the uses of tables, will receive on the floor from 18,000 to
20,000 volumes of all sizes, without losing the appearance of a room or
assuming that of a warehouse, and while leaving portions of space
available near the windows for purposes of study. If a gallery be added,
there will be accommodation for a further number of five thousand, and the
room need be no more than sixteen feet high. But a gallery is not suitable
for works above the octavo size, on account of inconvenience in carriage
to and fro.
It has been admitted that in order to secure the vital purpose of
compression with fixed shelving, the rule of arrangement according to
subjects must be traversed partially by division into sizes. This
division, however, need not, as to the bulk of the library, be more than
threefold. The main part would be for octavos. This is becoming more and
more the classical or normal size; so that nowadays the octavo edition is
professionally called the library edition. Then there should be deeper
cases for quarto and folio, and shallower for books below octavo, each
appropriately divided into shelves.
If the economy of time by compression is great, so is the economy of cost.
I think it reasonable to take the charge of provision for books in a
gentleman’s house, and in the ordinary manner, at a shilling a volume.
This may vary either way, but it moderately represents, I think, my own
experience, in London residences, of the charge of fitting up with
bookcases, which, if of any considerable size, are often unsuitable for
removal. The cost of the method which I have adopted later in life, and
have here endeavored to explain, need not exceed one penny per volume.
Each bookcase when filled represents, unless in exceptional cases, nearly
a solid mass. The intervals are so small that, as a rule, they admit a
very small portion of dust. If they are at a tolerable distance from the
fireplace, if carpeting be avoided except as to small movable carpets
easily removed for beating, and if sweeping be discreetly conducted, dust
may, at any rate in the country, be made to approach to a quantite
negligeable.
It is a great matter, in addition to other advantages, to avoid the
endless trouble and the miscarriages of movable shelves; the looseness,
and the tightness, the weary arms, the aching fingers, and the broken
fingernails. But it will be fairly asked what is to be done, when the
shelves are fixed, with volumes too large to go into them? I admit that
the dilemma, when it occurs, is formidable. I admit also that no book
ought to be squeezed or even coaxed into its place: they should move
easily both in and out. And I repeat here that the plan I have recommended
requires a pretty exact knowledge by measurement of the sizes of books and
the proportions in which the several sizes will demand accommodation. The
shelf-spacing must be reckoned beforehand, with a good deal of care and no
little time. But I can say from experience that by moderate care and use
this knowledge can be attained, and that the resulting difficulties, when
measured against the aggregate of convenience, are really insignificant.
It will be noticed that my remarks are on minute details, and that they
savor more of serious handiwork in the placing of books than of lordly
survey and direction. But what man who really loves his books delegates to
any other human being, as long as there is breath in his body, the office
of inducting them into their homes?
And now as to results. It is something to say that in this way 10,000
volumes can be placed within a room of quite ordinary size, all visible,
all within easy reach, and without destroying the character of the
apartment as a room. But, on the strength of a case with which I am
acquainted, I will even be a little more particular. I take as before a
room of forty feet in length and twenty in breadth, thoroughly lighted by
four windows on each side; as high as you please, but with only about nine
feet of height taken for the bookcases: inasmuch as all heavy ladders, all
adminicula requiring more than one hand to carry with care, are forsworn.
And there is no gallery. In the manner I have described, there may be
placed on the floor of such a room, without converting it from a room into
a warehouse, bookcases capable of receiving, in round numbers, 20,000
volumes.
The state of the case, however, considered as a whole, and especially with
reference to libraries exceeding say 20,000 or 30,000 volumes, and
gathering rapid accretions, has been found to require in extreme cases,
such as those of the British Museum and the Bodleian (on its limited
site), a change more revolutionary in its departure from, almost reversal
of, the ancient methods, than what has been here described.
The best description I can give of its essential aim, so far as I have
seen the processes (which were tentative and initial), is this. The masses
represented by filled bookcases are set one in front of another; and, in
order that access may be had as it is required, they are set upon trams
inserted in the floor (which must be a strong one), and wheeled off and on
as occasion requires.
The idea of the society of books is in a case of this kind abandoned. But
even on this there is something to say. Neither all men nor all books are
equally sociable. For my part I find but little sociabilty in a huge wall
of Hansards, or (though a great improvement) in the Gentleman’s Magazine,
in the Annual Registers, in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, or in the
vast range of volumes which represent pamphlets innumerable. Yet each of
these and other like items variously present to us the admissible, or the
valuable, or the indispensable. Clearly these masses, and such as these,
ought to be selected first for what I will not scruple to call interment.
It is a burial; one, however, to which the process of cremation will never
of set purpose be applied. The word I have used is dreadful, but also
dreadful is the thing. To have our dear old friends stowed away in
catacombs, or like the wine-bottles in bins: the simile is surely lawful
until the use of that commodity shall have been prohibited by the growing
movement of the time. But however we may gild the case by a cheering
illustration, or by the remembrance that the provision is one called for
only by our excess of wealth, it can hardly be contemplated without a
shudder at a process so repulsive applied to the best beloved among
inanimate objects.
It may be thought that the gloomy perspective I am now opening exists for
great public libraries alone. But public libraries are multiplying fast,
and private libraries are aspiring to the public dimensions. It may be
hoped that for a long time to come no grave difficulties will arise in
regard to private libraries, meant for the ordinary use of that great
majority of readers who read only for recreation or for general
improvement. But when study, research, authorship, come into view, when
the history of thought and of inquiry in each of its branches, or in any
considerable number of them, has to be presented, the necessities of the
case are terribly widened. Chess is a specialty and a narrow one. But I
recollect a statement in the Quarterly Review, years back, that there
might be formed a library of twelve hundred volumes upon chess. I think my
deceased friend, Mr. Alfred Denison, collected between two and three
thousand upon angling. Of living Englishmen perhaps Lord Acton is the most
effective and retentive reader; and for his own purposes he has gathered a
library of not less, I believe, than 100,000 volumes.
Undoubtedly the idea of book-cemeteries such as I have supposed is very
formidable. It should be kept within the limits of the dire necessity
which has evoked it from the underworld into the haunts of living men. But
it will have to be faced, and faced perhaps oftener than might be
supposed. And the artist needed for the constructions it requires will not
be so much a librarian as a warehouseman.
But if we are to have cemeteries, they ought to receive as many bodies as
possible. The condemned will live ordinarily in pitch darkness, yet so
that when wanted, they may be called into the light. Asking myself how
this can most effectively be done, I have arrived at the conclusion that
nearly two-thirds, or say three-fifths, of the whole cubic contents of a
properly constructed apartment12 may be made a nearly solid mass
of books: a vast economy which, so far as it is applied, would probably
quadruple or quintuple the efficiency of our repositories as to contents,
and prevent the population of Great Britain from being extruded some
centuries hence into the surrounding waters by the exorbitant dimensions
of their own libraries.
—The End—
FOOTNOTES:
1 (return)
[ In Der alte und der neue
Glaube]
2 (return)
[ xxi, 25.]
3 (return)
[ First of all it seems to
have referred to the red capital letters placed at the head of chapters or
other divisions of works.]
4 (return)
[ Cic. Pro Archia poeta,
vii.]
5 (return)
[ Essays Critical and
Historical, ii. 228.]
6 (return)
[ The Prayer Book recently
issued by Mr. Frowde at the Clarendon Press weighs, bound in morocco, less
than an once and a quarter. I see it stated that unbound it weighs
three-quarters of an ounce. Pickering’s Cattullus, Tibullus, and
Propertius in leather binding, weighs an ounce and a quarter. His Dante
weighs less than a number of the Times.]
7 (return)
[ See Libraries and the
Founders of Libraries, by B. Edwards, 1864, p. 5. Hallam, Lit. Europe.]
8 (return)
[ Hor. Ep. II. i. 270;
Persius, i. 48; Martial, iv. lxxxvii. 8.]
9 (return)
[ Edwards.]
10 (return)
[ Rouard, Notice sur la
Bibliotheque d’Aix, p. 40. Quoted in Edwards, p. 34.]
11 (return)
[ The Director of the
Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, which I suppose still to be the first
library in the world, in doing for me most graciously the honors of that
noble establishment, informed me that they full-bound annually a few
scores of volumes, while they half-bound about twelve hundred. For all the
rest they had to be contented with a lower provision. And France raises
the largest revenue in the world.]
12 (return)
[ Note in illustration. Let
us suppose a room 28 feet by 10, and a little over 9 feet high. Divide
this longitudinally for a passage 4 feet wide. Let the passage project 12
to 18 inches at each end beyond the line of the wall. Let the passage ends
be entirely given to either window or glass door. Twenty-four pairs of
trams run across the room. On them are placed 56 bookcases, divided by the
passage, reaching to the ceiling, each 3 feet broad, 12 inches deep, and
separated from its neighbors by an interval of 2 inches, and set on small
wheels, pulleys, or rollers, to work along the trams. Strong handles on
the inner side of each bookcase to draw it out into the passage. Each of
these bookcases would hold 500 octavos; and a room of 28 feet by 10 would
receive 25,000 volumes. A room of 40 feet by 20 (no great size) would
receive 60,000, It would, of course, be not properly a room, but a
warehouse.]