The library A catalogue of wonders

Review by New York Times Review

TO GET THROUGH times like these, I recommend drinking alcohol and making use of libraries. (Just not at the same time and, for best results, not in that order.) Library holdings have helped reassure me that values associated with reason, intellect and art really do tend to survive dark ages of various kinds. A space devoted to quiet reflection on the written word is also just so much nicer than, say, an echo chamber of negative covfefe. It was therefore a pleasure to sit down among the stacks and read a new book about the history of this very subject: "The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders," by Stuart Kells. Kells, an Australian author who in the past has written chiefly about the book business, here broadens his scope considerably: He begins by asking readers to think of libraries as arrangements of knowledge, and includes in his discussion the "immaterial libraries" that have been preserved through oral tradition by indigenous peoples. He takes on not only the physical development of the book - from the tablet and scroll to the codex - and the structures that were designed to house those texts, but the behavior of the human beings who have tended to hang around them. Even nonhumans, such as bookworms (so called) and silverfish, that lurk around inside them are given consideration. As the subtitle of Kell's survey suggests, the structure imitates that of a catalog or collection, one that includes many pamphletlength treats. Open the book and you may learn that the original statutes of the Bodleian Library at Oxford required that the librarian be unmarried - because "marriage is too full of domestical impeachements." Or you may learn why old books have that distinctive smell (the breakdown of chemical compounds in paper releases vanilla, almond and floral notes). Or how, when growing up, the novelist Jeanette Winterson Md her books from her Pentecostal evangelist parents. As Kells quotes her, "anyone with a single bed, standard size, and paperbacks, standard size, will discover that 77 can be accommodated per layer under the mattress." "The Library" lends itself to browsing, but a sequential reading reveals a larger theme. "The people of Alexandria and Athens knew the value of books for scholarship and culture and civil society," Kells writes. "In large part, the history of libraries is the history of how that value was forgotten, then rediscovered, then forgotten again." We are reminded of the frequency with which certain kinds of texts have been prohibited, if not destroyed, on religious, political or moral grounds; libraries have often not just protected their holdings, but kept them from everyday readers. Until recently, of course, books existed only as physical objects, and in a sense Kells, a rare-book expert, has written a chronicle of what it means to possess them. "The Library" abounds in fascinating tales of lost codices and found manuscripts, and the sometimes unscrupulous schemes by which people have conspired to obtain or amass valuable volumes. All this attention to private collections and ownership only underscores the importance of availability and access, and hints at the challenges faced by libraries now functioning in both physical and digital modes. Although Kells concedes that digitization has been a boon to researchers and general readers, he complains that "an encounter with an old book is miserably dimmed-down" if it takes place on a screen. This attachment to beautiful old books and beautiful old libraries is completely understandable (see my advice above). But it's helpful to remember that the bindings and the buildings are ultimately just delivery mechanisms for the actual stuff, the content that diverts, subverts, stimulates and enlightens. JOHN glassie is the author of "A Man of Misconceptions," a biography of the baroque polymath Athanasius Kirchen

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Libraries massively predate books, Kells asserts, if one defines a library as an organized collection of texts. He's thinking of the oral tradition: Warehoused as memories, legends, myths, prayers, parables, and poems were preserved and shared for generations. But as intriguing as this line of inquiry is leading Kells, an Australian historian of the book and a rare-book collector, to a stinging recounting of outsiders' attempts to understand the first Australians' Dreaming stories it is the physical book that delights and occupies him all the ways books have been made, amassed, sheltered, and accessed. In this free-roaming history of libraries, Kells, well read, well traveled, ebullient, and erudite, relishes tales of innovation, obsession, and criminality. Kells' scintillating, often irreverent catalog of wonders and bibliomaniacs begins with a reluctant cataloger, the future library director and renowned writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose tedious work at a municipal library in Buenos Aires inspired his indelible and disquieting short story, The Library of Babel. Kells will return to Borges after he tells the full story of the clay tablet, papyrus scroll, vellum and parchment codex, and printed books on paper, each technological advance paralleled by the evolution of library organization, design, and construction, including the development of the bookshelf and bindings that allowed books to stand upright. As soon as there were books, there were forgeries and thefts, yielding saucy bits of history. The rapid and constant proliferation of books means that libraries have their own Moore's law, Kells observes, necessitating structural and logistical evolution. As books multiplied, so did threats to libraries, from fires and floods to war and political change, not to mention the perpetual onslaught of voracious, book-eating insects. Kells, who will please readers of his fellow bibliophiles Alberto Manguel and Nicholas Basbanes, tells tales of the best and worst librarians in history, and outs library secrets, including the use of fake books, which he was pleased to see on a supersized scale at the Kansas City Public Library's splendid downtown branch. Kells also tracks the presence of libraries in literature, citing Hobbit libraries in Tolkien and Audrey Niffenegger's beautifully haunting illustrated novel, The Night Bookmobile (2010), among others. As Kells ponders the role of libraries now, he returns to Borges' vision of an infinite library, a prescient metaphor for the internet, which has created an even greater need for librarians and libraries and their arts of selection and curation. Much more than accumulations of books, writes Kells, the best libraries are hotspots and organs of civilizations; they are also places of solace and education, sources of nourishment for the human spirit, cultural staging posts in which new arrivals can be inducted into their adopted countries. Kells' revelatory romp through the centuries cues us to the fact that, as has so often been the case, libraries need our passionate attention and support, our advocacy, gratitude, and (given Kells' tales of book-kissing, including Coleridge pressing his lips to his copy of Spinoza) love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Book-trade historian Kells (Penguin and the Lane Brothers) blends scholarly expertise with sharp wit in this enjoyable history of libraries. From the ancient oral libraries of the Arrente people of Australia to the digitized collections of today, Kells consistently proves that "libraries are full of stories." He takes the reader inside some of the most famous libraries in the world, such as the Vatican Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In addition to exposing a trove of secret doors, hidden staircases, and disappearing ladders tucked away in these libraries, Kells unmasks centuries-old tales of crimes (stolen books, modified dust jackets, spurious blurbs), forgeries (like the corset at the Folger Library once believed to have belonged to Queen Elizabeth I), and spicy tales of erotica (the Russian State Library stockpiled thousands of erotic works in storage during the Cold War). He enriches this cultural history by linking the evolution of libraries to the history of book design and the expansion of literacy among social classes. Kells's passion for this subject suffuses this pleasurable book, calling readers to understand the importance of the library's role preserving humanity's history and why libraries are still relevant today. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

What is a library? Book trade historian Kells describes libraries as an "act of faith." Libraries cover many areas of human existence: being integral to education, offering solace and discovery, and providing a social connection. Interesting facts abound. Want to learn more about "bookworms," or Dermestes lardarius? What vellum is made from the skin of bovine fetuses? Each chapter follows a general theme, such as oral traditions, ancient books, design, and war. Interspersed after each chapter are brief stories on topics such as accidental physical items found in books and historical accounts of book vandalism. Kells also covers the development of both real (the Folger Shakespeare Library) and fantasy (J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings) institutions. The author ends with his own "love letter" to libraries, seeing them as something sacred, magical, and hard to quantify. Verdict This work takes readers on what can only be described as a labyrinth of traditions, facts, and vignettes that will whet the appetite of any bibliophile or lectiophile. It will appeal mostly to those who are attracted to the minutiae of libraries (although this is not an exhaustive history.)-Maria Bagshaw, Elgin Community Coll. Lib., IL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A bright, idiosyncratic tour of a book historian's collected knowledge about libraries and bibliophilia.More miscellany than catalog, the book assembles snippets from a wide variety of disciplines into an eclectic history of libraries as cultural, political, aesthetic, literary, mnemonic, and, above all, personal phenomena dedicated to collecting and preserving the written word. Australian book industry historian Kells (Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution, 2015, etc.), an expert on rare books, invokes recognizable figures such as Borges and Tolkien as patron saints of the library, but he also spotlights less familiar libraries and librarians from the dawn of writing to the information age, with thematic interludes for all the strange, obsessive things people have done with books besides reading them. The author leads us through this labyrinthine account by his own associative logic rather than following a systematic design; paragraphs jump from one millennium to another and back again, while lists of names and dates exhilarate and disorient in equal measure, running headlong through the stacks of the world's great collections. Kells leaves the modern library to other writers to chronicle and analyze, bypassing current and future threats to global archives and ignoring the rise of the hip librarian. In adapting academic subject matter for a mainstream audience, the author risks boring general readers with an accumulation of arcana and irritating scholarly readers by omitting the sources and depth of coverage that characterize a reputable book history. Still, the narrative merits attention for the way it enlivens dense summaries on printing, the book trade, collecting, library design, and bibliography with tales of the disasters, discoveries, and notable book lunatics that populate library lore.Readers familiar with St. Gall, Poggio, Count Libri, and other such significant figures in the history of manuscripts may look to more specialist accounts, but budding book enthusiasts will find this an engaging bedside read. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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PREFACE More than twenty years ago, when I was a young academic working glumly at a social research institute, one of the university colleges held a lunchtime book-sale. As soon as I arrived I found a smallish, squarish volume, handsomely printed in old-fashioned type. The binding was distinctively English: dark-blue, straight-grained morocco (a type of goatskin), the spine boldly gilded and segmented with raised bands in the style of Charles Lewis, the great nineteenth-century bookbinder. The title page revealed the publication date, 1814, and identified the book as Pieces of Ancient Poetry from Unpublished Manuscripts and Scarce Books . I knew 'ancient' meant the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and 'poetry' covered a breadth of ballads and verse. Otherwise, the book was a little mystery. Just two letters appeared where the author's name should have been: 'NY'. Nor was the publisher identified. A footnote revealed ninety-six copies had been printed, plus six 'specials' on blue paper. The book in my hands was one of the six. I turned to the back and read the 'Disposition of the copies'. Though the book kept secret its author and publisher, it named Sheepshanks, Peckover, Pople and the other subscribers who had agreed in advance to buy a copy. Several of the listed men were Roxburghers, members of the world's most illustrious and exclusive bibliophile society: Sir Mark Masterman Sykes (a blue copy and a white copy), Sir Francis Freeling, Archdeacon Francis Wrangham, and (enjoying another book purchase before his imminent bankruptcy) George Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford. Here, then, in pristine condition and with exceptional pedigree, was a beautifully made and exceptionally scarce collection of rare texts from the time of Shakespeare. In some quarters, leather-bound books are out of fashion. They are 'brown books' to go with 'brown furniture'. But finding Pieces was a perfect life moment, the kind of discovery that explains why bibliophiles spend much of their lives at flea markets, book stalls, car boots and garage sales. Walking home that day, I looked forward to showing the prize to my fiancé Fiona. We were living in a tower block that used to be a hotel; our apartment still had a minibar-fridge and a wall-mounted hairdryer. Fiona and I grappled with how best to accommodate our VIP guest. Archival box? Shelf to breathe? Would steam from the kitchenette bother the morocco? Over the following weeks I researched Pieces, consulting in the Baillieu Library the Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature and a nineteenth-century edition of the Dictionary of National Biography . 'NY', it turned out, was John Fry, a young bookseller from Bristol: N and Y are the terminal letters of his first and last names, a common device of ceremonial anonymity. (Fry's final book was even less anonymous: it identified its editor as 'J-N F-Y'.) Fiona and I saved our money and searched for other Fries. Soon, in our tiny flat, we had the world's best John Fry collection (the Folger Shakespeare Library contained his other works but not Pieces) and we were beginning to appreciate fully our book-sale find. In strictly monetary terms, Pieces was the most valuable thing we owned. But it was more than an asset we could liquidate if we had to. It became for us a talisman. We had found the nucleus of our future library. Pieces was also a treasure map, and a portal into multiple strands of a bookish life. John Fry admitted Fiona and I into the circle of gentlemen who, during the reign of King George III, preserved rare books and documents from centuries past. He tutored us on the pillars of good bibliographical method, and exposed us to the most sublime forms of bibliomania. He introduced us to black-letter men, gilt toppers, rough edgers, tall copyists, broadsiders, Aldusians, Elzevirians, Grangerites, pasquinaders and tawny moroccoites. He initiated us into Elizabethanism and invited us to celebrate the edgy side of Shakespeare's work. And he enlisted us into the search for Shakespeare's missing library. The discovery sparked an epiphany somewhere between On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . I became a student again, determined to learn everything I needed to become a bookman. Nearby universities offered no degrees in vocational bookmanship. Inspired by Fry and his circle, I improvised my own course, plucking units from literature, psychology, philosophy, art, commerce, curatorship, history, law, logic, mathematics - a mixture that made no sense to anyone but Fiona and me. When eventually I graduated, I walked away with a book about bookselling, a masters in book auctions, a doctorate in law, the untidiest transcript in Christendom, and a bespoke qualification in bibliophilia. On weekends I started 'running' books: driving around with a car full mostly of paperbacks, wholesaling them between bookshops. Fiona and I issued catalogues of highlights from our stock. Every book we bought to sell was a puzzle, a judgement to be backed. We relished the chance to work with objects, not just ideas. For Fiona and I, this was the beginning of a career in books that saw us working side by side in a publishing house, and issuing with delight a series of books about books. We exhibited at bookfairs, and sold books to venerated libraries such as the Bodleian, whose users must swear not to remove or deface the objects therein, nor to set them on fire. In the course of our work we visited hundreds of libraries. Libraries tidy and chaotic, dry and damp, fragrant and malodorous, welcoming and dangerous, containing nearly every kind of book: loved and neglected, meritorious and meretricious, read and unread. We explored national libraries, working men's libraries, subscription libraries, scholarly libraries, corporate libraries, club libraries, plush private libraries and very modest ones, like the collection of 'found' books amassed by a demolition man in the course of his labours, every volume methodically catalogued and lovingly preserved. We ventured 'off-catalogue' to make exhilarating discoveries on library shelves, like mislaid pamphlets, overlooked signatures, legendary variants, extra-illustrated rarities and hidden fore-edge paintings. We explored restricted spaces inside libraries, like the exquisite Shakespeare Room in the State Library of New South Wales; the super-tight spiral staircases deep inside the State Library of Victoria; and the panopticon cavity above the vaulted glass dome of the nearby parliamentary library, modelled on the original Reichstag. We studied the crimes of book owners, such as the farmers who stored in a woolshed a priceless set (forty-one elephant-folio volumes) of John Gould's marvellous zoological illustrations; and the farmers' town cousins who stored a unique collection of books and manuscripts in a fireplace. We called on the hoarder who cut an indoor pathway to his bathtub, where his most prized possessions were kept. And we swooned over medieval libraries with books shelved spine-inward and attached to chains to prevent escape. We learnt that libraries are much more than mere accumulations of books. Every library has an atmosphere, even a spirit. Every visit to a library is an encounter with the ethereal phenomena of coherence, beauty and taste. But libraries are not Platonic abstractions or sterile, hyperbaric chambers. They are human places into which humans cry tears, moult hair, slough skin, sneeze snot and deposit oil from their hands - incidentally the best sustenance for old leather bindings. How much of themselves did Shakespeare, Donne, Hemingway and Woolf leave behind in their libraries? And how much of their personalities is discernible from their books? Creating a library is a psychically loaded enterprise. In gathering their bounty, booklovers have displayed anxiety, avarice, envy, fastidiousness, obsession, lust, pride, pretension, narcissism and agoraphobia - indeed every Biblical sin and most of the pathologies from the American Psychiatric Association manual. When visitors called on the seventeenth-century Welsh bibliophile Sir William Boothby, he wished they would hurry up and leave. 'My company is gone, so that now I hope to enjoy my selfe and books againe, which are the true pleasures of my life, all else is but vanity and noyse'. John Hill Burton described a book collector whose nervous temperament was so sensitive that he could not tolerate an alien book in proximity to his library; 'the existence within his dwelling-place of any book not of his own special kind, would impart to him the sort of feeling of uneasy horror which a bee is said to feel when an earwig comes into its cell.' Collectors, having acquired and arranged their books through whichever means and by whatever schema, have used every kind of simile to describe their beloved possessions. Garden flowers, verdant leaves, precious fruit, flowing fountains. Ships, houses, bricks, doors, nails, bullets, daggers, windows, voices, songs, chapters, memories, scents, elixirs, cogs, coins, countries, toys, birds, worlds, meteorites, gems, friends, offspring, prisoners, tenants, soldiers, lovers, wraiths, devils, bones, eyes, teeth. John Baxter imagined the books in his Graham Greene collection rustling and rubbing against each other every night like a colony of insects. Libraries provide ideal habitats for real insects, which are attracted to quiet, darkish, starchy places. Fiona and I have seen whole shelves of books destroyed by burrowing worms. For me now, the mounds and trails they left behind are the stuff of genuinely horrifying nightmares. We've also seen whole collections ruined by grazing silverfish, the bibliophile's nemesis. Those monsters relish pulpy paper and the crunchy starch in book glue and book cloth. Seemingly preferring richer inks, they devastate dust-jackets with tracks that look fiendishly deliberative. From our visits to libraries we've also learnt much about the integrity of shelves. Smooth, strong and open are best. Sagging shelves deform books into painful, non-Euclidean shapes. Abrasive shelves wear away at leather bindings. Books behind glass get sick from breathing their own air. Excerpted from The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart Kells All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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