Books to the wall

TABLE TALK PENIS BROGAN

Showing that although I am no longer a pro- fessor. I still am a don, most of my indignation

and interest this week have been due to the quarrel over the British Museum Library. The general state of muddle in the higher academic world or on the bureaucratic side of the aca- demic world has been illustrated by official statements and by some remarkably foolish arguments by respectable newspapers. Very few people who are not in the academic business seem to realise what is the issue in the British Museum Library quarrel.

It is not a matter of the inefficiency of the National Central Library, an admirable and badly under-financed organisation. It is not a question of setting up an equivalent of a giro system in the library world. It is not a question

even of spending much more money on univer- sity libraries than has been done, a cause I have deeply at heart. It is the barbarous, ill-informed

and bad-mannered decision of the Government to keep the British Museum Library, above all the great reading room, in its present state of necessary inefficiency—necessary because for many years now this highly cultivated country has not found the money or the energy to pro- vide adequate equipment and adequate funds for this most celebrated of reading rooms.

I am leaving on one side all McLuhanite arguments that books are on the way out. I do not believe this is happening, and it has been pointed out that the country where McLuhanite ideas have the most chance of being put into action, i.e. the United States, has not aban- doned the Library of Congress.

From what two successive Ministers of Edu- cation and Science have said, it would not sur- prise me to learn that neither has ever set foot in the great Panizzi reading room and that neither has any idea of what the controversy is really about. It has nothing to do with the need of providing more textbooks or other books for undergraduates. It has nothing to do with rationalising the distribution of books among

the now too numerous university libraries (al- most all of them disastrously inadequate) or even the improvement of the circulation of

books among the numerous public libraries, some of which, all things allowed for, are very good. It is a question of salvaging the British

Museum Library and making it worthy of its great reputation. Whether Mr Crosland or Mr

Gordon Walker or even the Prime Minister (an ex-don himself) understands the problem, seems to me extremely uncertain. In any country the size of Britain or France, there should be and must be somewhere a great central library which, within the limits of the possible (possible in this instance meaning mainly financial re- sources), will provide books on all subjects for serious academic study.

My own opinion (on which I do not insist) is that this great central library should cover all subjects. It need not raise any question about the location, for example, of the Patent Office Library, but I am not much in favour of a separate science library because it is difficult to separate 'science' from other subjects. This, of course, does not mean that the Imperial College should not have a very well-endowed library of its own. But some- where in London therwought to be the nearest equivalent we can afford of the Library of Congress or of what, I am told, is its only pos- sible rival, the Leningrad Library. We already have one of the three or four most celebrated libraries in the world on the British Museum site. We have the first great reading room de- signed for the work of modern scholarship.

(Architecturally Panizzi's dome is as remark- able as the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, and more remarkable than the Library of Congress.) It is unfortunate that the news- papers are out at Colindale, but it is too late to do anything about that.

What is being threatened by the vague plans of Mr Gordon Walker (or his predecessor?) is the existence and extension in central London of a very remarkable agglomeration of aca- demic institutions, many of which are there because they are near the British Museum Library. For example, the library of the Uni- versity of London on the university site, the library of the Institute of Historical Research, to some degree the library of University Col- lege, of which Lord Annan, a trustee of the British Museum, is provost, have been affected by the proximity of the British Museum. So has the library policy of the new Institute of American Studies.

If the British Museum Library is. for a long time to come, to be confined to its present site and to its consequent slum conditions, the University of London and the great concentra- tion of learned institutions round the British Museum will be hamstrung if not castrated. In some of the discussions I have seen a misunder- standing of the need for a non-lending library in the centre of London. The idea that there can be a great central library in Bootle or Hogs- wash, advanced by a newspaper I shall not name, can be dismissed as illiterate nonsense. If the John Rylands Library in Manchester needs more space, and I expect it does, there is a very ugly building in Cross Street which could be replaced by a library skyscraper.

It is, perhaps, because I taught in Oxford before I taught in Cambridge that I prefer the Oxford policy of not lending books. All these regulations for getting books back when some- body asks for them tend to break down in prac- tice, just as the promises of one's friends break down. And one of the great merits of the British Museum is that it does not lend books to any giro or to anything else.

To end on a slightly more cheerful note; there is a famous occasion of Bodley (of which I used to be a Curator) lending an important scholarly document against the regulations. Before the First World War, Strachan-David- son, Master of Balliol. was editing Polybius. He went into Bodley and asked for Bodley's Librarian, the famous Falconer Madan. The Librarian was, however, off in Connaught deal- ing with his kinsmen. (All readers of this jour- nal will know that the citizens of Galway used to pray, 'From the wrath of the O'Madans, Good Lord deliver us.' Bodley's Librarian justified this prayer.) The Under-Librarian lent Strachan-Davidson what he asked for: the admiralty chart of Cartagena, since he was editing the part of Polybius that deals with the siege of Cartagena. A fortnight later, the Master brought the chart bac!: and Madan had returned. He thanked Bodley's Librarian for the favour and said the chart had been ex- tremely valuable: it showed how wonderfully accurate as an historian Polybius was. 'It isn't wonderful. It's miraculous. That damn fool gave you the chart of Cartagena in South America.' Which thing is a parable to be digested by whoever is Minister of Education and Science in, say, six months from now.