Books furnish a room, but libraries can be a menace
PAUL JOHNSON
Ihave been given a superb Thames & Hudson book, The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World, and browsing through it has prompted thoughts on this difficult subject. All libraries pose insuperable problems, of acquisition, purpose, storage and access. They never stand still but expand relentlessly and thereby strangle themselves. I once heard a rich duke, owner of one of Europe's finest private collections of books, exclaim in agony, 'Don't talk to me about the library. I don't know what to do about it.' Another rich duke, less of a bibliophile, snarled in my hearing, 'I never go in the library. Nothing but trouble brewing in there.' When the new British Library was nearing completion I went to a cocktail party there and, stumbling along a corridor in search of a loo, came across the following angry notice pinned to a door: 'Please do not bring BOOKS in here!' Did I detect the note of rising hysteria never far below the quiet ticking-of-the-clock surface of a big library? I recall an elderly man, important in the hierarchy of the Bodleian, muttering, perhaps to himself, but in the hearing of Duke Humphrey's bust (and mine), 'I'm not sure I like books after all.' Books are heavy to carry, often in the wrong place, do not fit the shelf, have volumes mysteriously missing and are, in general, recalcitrant objects. My mother, married to a man who bought books without considering where they were to be housed, said, 'I make no bones about it. I hate books. Civilisation can do without them.'
It is a fact that books, especially those stored in libraries, are seldom read or even consulted. They are lucky to be looked at. The best way to stop a book being read is to put it in a grand library. The magnificent monastic libraries described in the book — Admont in Austria, Metten and Wiblingen in Germany, St Gall in Switzerland — contain endless rows of folios, magnificently bound in morocco or vellum or parchment, displayed in sumptuous carved and gilded shelves, and never disturbed except for their periodic dusting (lucky to get that in many cases). Not long ago I visited the splendid abbey of Melk, with its superb library, and asked the attendant if I could look at a particular volume. 'Look at it! You are looking at it."Well, read it, then.' 'Read it? This isn't a lending library, you know. This is an art museum.' 'Twas always thus. When Assurbanipal built up a library of 26,000 clay tablets in Nineveh, were they ever read then, stored as they were in baskets, bags and jars, not many on wooden shelves? What a fuss to get at them: no catalogue, hard work just shifting the things from bag to jar. And are they used now, buried as they all are in the cellars of the British Museum? Read any good clay tablets recently, professor? In some libraries you cannot even look properly at the precious folios displayed on the shelves. Building the Escorial, which eventually housed his own excellent library, that weird and perverse man Philip II of Spain laid down that, in order to protect the decorative spines of his fine books from the sunlight, they were all to be shelved facing the wall. This meant that the titles had to be written in ink on the edges of the pages. As the people told to do this were idle, only bits of the title were thus inscribed, so the system doesn't work. But it is still there.
Philip II, incidentally, got Julian de Herera, around 1567, to design the first modern grand book-room at the Escorial. It is over 200 feet long, with barrel vaulting 40 feet high, and the built-in shelving was the first to be carved in a uniform fashion in wooden imitation of the Doric order. I'm not sure about these regal rooms for storing books, however. They tend to constitute yet another obstacle to the books being read. The Laurentian Library in Florence, designed by Michelangelo, is one of the best things the master did in his life. The entrance and steps leading up to it, which he constructed in different colours and shades of marble, are a miracle of contrivance, line, perspective and texture, so that to walk up them, feeling the brilliance of invention under your feet, is actually to enter a work of supreme art, to inhabit and use it — a unique sensation. But I would not care to visit the main room to read books in, even if that were allowed, which of course it is not. I have the same feeling about Christopher Wren's much lauded library at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is too lavish, too regular, too precious. I notice now that the readers are crowded up at one end, around plain tables, the rest being roped off. Once that fatal rope makes its appearance, the primary purpose of a library is lost.
It is an axiom of mine: the grander the book's appearance, the less often it is read. The most sumptuous of all books, the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, housed in the Duc d'Aumale's Cabinet de Livres in Chantilly, is occasionally displayed and endlessly reproduced. But how long is it since it was used for its primary purpose, prayer? Was it ever thus used? Does it even occur to those who gawp at it that it is a prayer book? Once, years ago, when I was making a TV movie, I was allowed to hold in my hands the actual Domesday Book in the Public Record Office. I recall that, though apparently ponderous, it was quite light to hold, for parchment is not as heavy as modern paper. But the Domesday Book was an example of the futility of book-making. Compiled with such amazing energy, making it a record unique in mediaeval European administration, and arousing great resentment at the time, it was never actually used.
Books are living things, I genuinely believe, which follow their own parabolas of birth, use and misuse, and death, often enjoying surprising resurrections, though most, I fear, fall stillborn from the presses. Libraries on the larger scale are now perpetuated by the state, not always for the better. I like a certain intimacy in a library. The Mazarin Library in Paris, a goodly place when I used it half a century ago, had amazing squeaky floorboards going back to the old cardinal's day. I loved those noises, as though the place itself were speaking. But experts hate them, a reaction acquired from across the Atlantic. (A North American billionaire, over here to buy a London home, complained to me, 'Those crooks tried to sell me places with squeaky floors!') So the last time the Mazarin was modernised, the squeaks were eliminated and the ancient voice of the book-room silenced. My favourite library time was in the great freeze of 1947, when the Radcliffe Camera was the warmest place in Oxford, and we sat there, often on the floor, keeping snug, exchanging notes with the undergraduettes and gazing up at their plump calves. The best libraries are not those which have everything — there is the Internet for that — but haphazard ones where you can ferret about and find treasures you have never heard of. I am thinking of Irish country house libraries like Clandeboye or Tullinalley, with huge logs crackling in the fireplace while the rain sluices down outside. Bibliographical bliss!
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