The Care of Books: An Essay on the Development of Libraries and Their Fittings, From the Earliest Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century

"We could start with an almost ancient book itself now, which is JW Clark’s The Care of Books . This has as its subtitle “an essay on the development of libraries and their fittings, from the earliest times to the end of the 18th century.” I have the second edition, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1909 and it’s well illustrated with photographs and line drawings. It is an absolutely fantastic historical survey, very detailed, very meticulous scholarship. He goes and visits all the libraries he discusses, right from the ancient world. He’s in an era which is just learning about the excavations in Mesopotamia by Austen Henry Layard, which uncovered the libraries of Ashurbanipal. That had happened 40 years before, and the cuneiform tablets which were in those libraries and archives had been brought back to London, to the British Museum, for decipherment. He picks up on this knowledge and also talks about libraries that are better known, like Hadrian’s Library at Athens. A lot of it is about famous libraries in Britain, like the Oxford and Cambridge college libraries. He’s writing from Cambridge, where he’s an architectural historian and writes a famous architectural history of Cambridge. He is also reading literary texts to pick up snippets of information about how libraries were organized or managed, or how writers engaged with libraries. I still go to this book for basic information as a starting point. Someday, I’d quite like to update it in the kind of detail that he has. He pulls together a whole variety of sources to give this long overview over 2,000 years. I’d say his book is not purely an architectural history because he does talk about the systems that librarians put in place in order to organize them. He thinks in three dimensions and looks for evidence, not just of the layout of the library in architectural terms, but in the fittings too: What kind of desks did they have? What kind of seats did they have? What kind of catalogues did they have and how were they arranged? How were the books organized on the shelves? It’s more of a practical guide to how libraries were organized in the past. It doesn’t quite get to the more philosophical detail of the organization of knowledge, classification schemes and things like that. Nor does it talk a lot about the profession of librarian: how did these early librarians get taught their trade? What was the relationship between librarians in monasteries and scriptoria? Those kinds of things aren’t really dealt with in his book, but it’s moving towards that. More recent scholarship is much more fragmentary. There are very detailed articles, or there’s the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland , for example, which I wrote a chapter in the first volume, which pulls everything together. But in terms of a single, holistic way of reading about the history of libraries this is still a fantastic book. He writes extremely well, and it’s well-footnoted and extremely well-illustrated, both with drawings and photographs. I think being able to envisage how they’re organized is an important aspect of libraries because they are three-dimensional. He really helps the reader with those illustrations. I wondered about including it. It is wonderfully evocative about libraries. I read it while I was an undergraduate. I’d gone interrailing with a friend in Italy, and my friend picked up an English translation and read it before anyone in the UK had. I remember reading it on the overnight train back from Rome. It’s wonderful in the way it weaves the history of ideas and religious ideas, of heresy and all these things into the plot in a very sophisticated way. The library is almost a character in the book. But it’s just slightly too fanciful. And the librarian is the villain, so I couldn’t recommend it! That’s part of the reason why I wrote the book, to draw attention not just to the function that libraries and archives play in society, but to the role that librarians and archivists play. I’ve gone through my career either being stereotyped in the popular imagination or being just ignored and treated as irrelevant or worthless. The public needs to know what librarians are, and what we do. It’s not this safe and cozy world that popular fiction might portray, it’s a dangerous game to be in. I have just written a piece for the FT on librarians and archivists in Afghanistan , where they’re literally under attack. I’ve been in touch with one archivist who got beaten up last week, his money and his laptop stolen. He had to get out of Afghanistan and is now in Pakistan because of the work he was doing. Yes. Also, still on the Afghanistan theme, there are a number of libraries around the world at the moment who are archiving Afghan websites, because they are being attacked by the Taliban. There’s one website of an independent library that has been built since 2017, in memory of a woman who was killed by a Taliban suicide bomb . That library has been attacked by the Taliban and the website has been taken down. We don’t know why. But capturing that information is of great current concern."