Part 1 (1/2)
On Books and the Housing of Them.
by William Ewart Gladstone.
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 a.s.sistance of a pa.s.sable argument, inasmuch as it has been discovered that the stars are inhabited; for where, he asks, could room now be found for such a mult.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, I entertain more proximate apprehension of pressure upon available s.p.a.ce 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. n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 Cicero[4] 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 a.s.syria, 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 a.s.sign 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 pa.s.sed away.
The time may be approaching when we shall be able to estimate the quant.i.ty 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 t.i.tle on its back, as the roll of parchment could hardly do. It is established that in Roman times the bad inst.i.tution 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 compa.s.s 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 ma.n.u.scripts. But some ten years back the Director of the Bibliotheque Nationale informed me that the French King John collected twelve hundred ma.n.u.scripts, at that time an enormous library, out of which several scores were among the treasures in his care. Mary of Medicis appears to have ama.s.sed in the sixteenth century, probably with far less effort, 5,800 volumes.[9] Oxford had before that time received n.o.ble gifts for her University Library. And we have to recollect with shame and indignation that that inst.i.tution 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 munic.i.p.al 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 n.o.ble 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 s.p.a.ce 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 superst.i.tion. 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 s.h.i.+elds? 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sorted 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 compa.s.s 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 acc.u.mulation. 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 s.p.a.ce in the attempt to lodge objects of such different sizes in one and the same bookcase. And this waste of s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.sified in a library intended for practical use and reading, and boldly answers by suggesting five cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.sification 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-cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.sification. 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 a.s.semblages 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.