What the world knows now ... Libraries

Libraries which have weathered the vagaries of time ... corrections and collections – relative to my previous post Scarlett reminded me of Ashur, the Assyrian king, who established the first systematically organised library in the ancient Middle East, part of which survives at Nineveh, northern Iraq.

While I managed to omit the Asian libraries – the Imperial Library is the earliest known Chinese library, with history dating back to the Qin Dynasty (221 – 207 BC); while the first classification and book notation systems were introduced soon afterwards during the Han Dynasty.

Biblioteca Joanina, Coimbra
University, Portugal
 (Baroque style 1700s) 

At this time the library catalogue was written on scrolls of fine silk and stored in silk bags .... reminds me of the origins of tea bags 2,000 years later!  But on a more serious note – the Rulers had this tendency to eradicate their history ...

In our western world Libraries were coming into their own at much the same time as those in the East ...

In Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable under ‘Library’ I find it reported that Strabo mentions the public libraries in Athens and Rome.  We know that Strabo travelled the Saharan region ...

... weathering the sands of life – there used to be trade routes (as above circa 1400) across the Sahara Desert connecting the oases to the shores of Western Africa, the Mediterranean and the Nile from where the Silk Route extended its trails further east, north and south.

Mauritania

We forget that trade and information exchange started about 9,000 years ago ... moving on over time to gold, ivory, spices, wheat, plants and animals ...  then salt, cloth, beads and metal goods – trade being recorded and conducted through middlemen inhabiting the area, who were aware of passages through the drying desert lands.

And believe it or not – education too – from a library in the sand ...  Chinguetti is a trading centre in northern Mauritania.  Michael Palin’s travels show us the tiny passageways in this town, with little shade from the beating, burning sun  ... the creep of the desert sand all pervading.

Library in the Desert

Yet in a side street nearby, the word ‘Bibliotheque’ is scrawled on the stone lintel ... when Palin enters he finds himself in a tiny room with a librarian! 

This old man presides and protects the bundles of papers wrapped in leather bindings or manila folders –  stacked on the shelves around the room.

As Palin mentions the quality of the work is exquisite and these books, loosened from their bindings over time, have been in the old man’s family for centuries ...

... he treats the texts like old friends, moving his finger from right to left, as the Chinese and Japanese do, across the delicate spidery calligraphy.

Chingueti

This library reminds us of the golden days from the 13^th century and on when Chinguetti was one of the great centres of Islamic scholarship.  These “desert librarians” are struggling to save this treasure from wind and sand, as literary remnants from the time when Chinguetti was a flourishing city along the caravan route, a cultural lighthouse for poets and scholars alike.

In our time we worry about the pilfering that goes on – the early scholars and monks dealt with their books by chaining them – the Chained Library came into existence ...

... the Hereford Cathedral Chained Library (see below) has recently been relocated to a new building, where the whole library arrangement can now be seen in its original arrangement (1611 – 1841), but also allows the books to be better protected in a controlled environment.

The chain is fitted to the corner or cover of the book – not to the spine – avoiding the stress of wear and tear when moving on and off the shelf.  The chain is attached to the book (via a ringlet) and each book is housed with its spine facing away from the reader with only the pages’ fore-edges visible (for us that is the ‘wrong’ way round).  This means that each book could be removed and opened without the need to be turned around, hence avoiding the tangle in its chain.

There were books at Hereford Cathedral long before there was a ‘library’ in the modern sense ... with the Cathedral’s earliest and most important book as the eighth century Hereford Gospels – one of 299 medieval manuscripts held within the Chains.

Pope Sixtus IV appoints Bartolomeo Platina: Prefect of the Vatican Library - fresco by Melozzo da Forli, 1477

Brewer’s then mentions various other great libraries of our more modern day:–   (NB: my Brewer’s cost £3.75 in 1974!)

·        the Vatican Library being noted for its antiquity and manuscript wealth (formerly established in 1475, though in fact much older)

·        the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana, Florence (opened to the public in 1571) has a particularly fine collection of classical manuscripts

·        other great national libraries in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Moscow

·        St Andrew’s University, Scotland (1546)

·        here in Britain – the British Museum (1753)

·        the Bodleian Library, Oxford

·        Cambridge University Library

·        Harvard Library – is the oldest in the USA (1638)

·        New York Library

·        Specialist libraries in California, Washington and New York

Bibliotheque Awra Amba,
Community Library Ethiopia

Natural disasters, human destruction or degradation, and weather systems all continue to play their role in the libraries of our times ...

... yet from the wellspring of humanity we are recreating the record of our world’s history and knowledge with new libraries, preservation of the old, and looking at new openings, as Steven Pressfield has reported here ...

... in an article by Callie Oettinger: The Blockbuster Super Library: Booksellers come and go – as do publishers ... But libraries ... Those have been constant throughout world history.  They never go away.

Oettinger quotes an article from Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly’s: At O’Reilly we’ve tried to focus not on the form of the book but on the job that it does for our customers.  It teaches, it informs, it entertains.  How might electronic publishing help us to advance those aims?

Here they are referring to the technical and educational books via Safari Online – let’s hope that publishers of novels will come up with a Blockbuster Super Library for all the genres.

Perhaps Joanne DeMaio of Whole Latte Life ....  is onto the right idea – have you seen her recent foray into marketing for her novel .. it is here: What’s www Got To Do With It?

StevenPressfield’s Online post: The Blockbuster Super Library – deserves a read and a study.

Enjoy the reading – here endeth my lesson on libraries (for now)!  This was not the route these posts were intending to go ...

MichaelPalin’s Travels – the tv series was accompanied by a book;

World Heritage – photographs by Remi Benali of Chinguetti .... beautiful!

Hilary Melton-Butcher

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