The Library: A World History

"James is an architectural historian and this is a book he wrote with photographer Will Pryce, a wonderful photographer. To some extent, it brings Clark up to date in that it’s a long sweep of history, it begins with the ancient world and moves forward to modern libraries. Like Clark, he is an architectural historian, but his focus is much more on the architecture rather than on the functioning of libraries. But I think the real strength of his book is in the section on the great European libraries of the 18th and 19th centuries. So it includes institutions I’ve been to like the Strahov Library in Prague, the Mafra in Portugal, the Admont Abbey Library, the Abbey Library of Saint Gall in Switzerland. These are extraordinary Baroque and Rococo creations, which look inside like wedding cakes. They’re absolutely amazing. I think this period is his specialty as an architectural historian, and he writes about them with great passion and interest and depth. I often use it as a way into library history, as a first port of call. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s called a world history and there are some libraries in China and Japan that he does include, but it is predominantly about European and North American libraries. I showed him around the Bodleian once, and I took him on various behind-the-scenes tours when he was doing his research. The book costs 50 quid, but that’s pretty good value: there must be 300 colour photographs and Thames and Hudson publishes it beautifully. As a broad overview of the history of libraries as structures it’s an absolutely fantastic book and I highly recommend it. I should mention that I haven’t yet read a new book published by Profile called The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen . It’s not published until next month, but I’m reviewing it. It’s highly possible that if we’d done this interview in a month’s time, I might have recommended that one. Oh, yes. Incredible libraries are being built all the time. There are very small, jewel-like libraries being built in Oxford and Cambridge colleges. St. John’s College, Oxford just built a beautiful new library. The architects Wright and Wright have a specialism in libraries, so they also did the new extension for the library at Magdalen College, Oxford as well as the new library at Lambeth Palace. It’s an attempt to reconnect Lambeth Palace with the local community and to make the palace and the library and its treasures and the whole estate more accessible. There’s a tower that members of the public are allowed to go up and view the gardens and the neighborhood. It’s a viewpoint which otherwise doesn’t exist in that part of London. It also has exhibition galleries. That’s quite a good example of a new small boutique library. But there are also great big new library buildings being built and or that have been built recently. Rem Koolhaas did the amazing Seattle public library nearly 20 years ago now. It’s absolutely astonishing modern architecture. A Japanese architecture firm called SANAA did the new university library in Lausanne for the École Polytechnique. It’s called the Rolex Learning Center, so you can guess where the money came from, but it’s like a piece of Swiss cheese that’s been dropped from space. It’s the only library that I’ve ever been in that has internal hills – so the cheese hasn’t dropped flat. It is absolutely wild, but it’s incredibly popular. It’s open to the public. There’s a Michelin-starred restaurant there too. It’s absolutely vast, a whole campus center, as well as the library. The maths library has this very, very quiet, silent space so that you can really think through those equations. Then there’s flexible seating so that students can work in groups but separated off because there’s a hill between them and the maths section. There’s another, even more photographically-driven book, with beautiful colour photographs, by a famous German photographer, Candida Höfer that I like . Again, when she came to photograph in the Bodleian, I had the pleasure of escorting her to the Radcliffe Camera and to Duke Humfrey’s Library. She’s sometimes photographing the same libraries as Will Pryce, but in a very different way. Will Pryce seems, to me, to capture the atmosphere of the libraries he visits, the lighting is much more variable. Candida Höfer’s style is much more analytic. She comes from the Dusseldorf School so she was taught by Bernd and Hilla Becher. The photographs are laid out on the page, without text. You’re driven to the photographs, whereas the text and the photographs are integrated with each other in the Campbell and Pryce book. But that analytic style, that very geometrical approach, conveys the beauty of the ordinary, which I guess is what the Dusseldorf School was trying to do. That repetition with those small variations is where beauty lies. You see the similarities between libraries that may be separated by geography. Or she photographs piles of books, with just their four edges outward. She’s drawn to the pattern, to the geometry, to the visual impact, of what she sees, whereas we as librarians might just see a pile of books and think, ‘Quick, let’s get them on the shelf.’ It was a near miss. It doesn’t have that utilitarian value that the other five have for what they write about libraries. Like you, Nigel, I’m a great lover of photography. This is a book to go to just to see the beauty of a great photographer at work in great libraries."