The Ark of Studies

{Bibliochaise, from nobody&co..}

From "Prologues to a Personal Library," by Jorge Luis Borges:

A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe.

Anyone with an interest in the various schema by which books may be organized is liable at some point to find himself thinking about the furniture that carries out those organizational plans. Bookshelves are a remarkably simple, effective design for most of our storage and retrieval purposes. Yet they're not very good at handling one of the most basic problems that has faced scholars and dilettantes alike since the first bound volumes: how to deal with the fact that one is often reading half a dozen or more books more or less simultaneously? How is one to keep all those books in easy reach and usefully organized--especially when so many readers, like me, have already given over control of the most natural resting place for extra volumes--the lap--to a cat or two?

Via the Athanasius Kircher Society, I've learned about an admirable solution from sixteenth-century Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli: the Book Wheel.



Here's how Ramelli described it in 1588:

A beautiful and ingenious machine, which is very useful and convenient to every person who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are suffering from indisposition or are subject to gout: for with this sort of machine a man can see and read a great quantity of books, without moving his place: besides, it has this fine convenience, which is, of occupying a little space in the place where it is set, as any person of understanding can appreciate from the drawing.

Meanwhile, in this week's New Yorker Anthony Grafton highlights more inventions designed to help sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars deal with the unprecedented flood of books:

Jacques Cujas, a sixteenth-century legal scholar, astonished visitors to his study when he showed them the rotating barber's chair and movable bookstand that enabled him to keep many open books in view at the same time. Thomas Harrison, a seventeenth-century English inventor, devised a cabinet that he called the Ark of Studies: readers could synopsize and excerpt books and then arrange their notes by subject on a series of labeled metal hooks, somewhat in the manner of a card index. The German philosopher Leibniz obtained one of Harrison's cabinets and used it in his research.

The Ark of Studies reminds me of Dr. Johnson's relatively simple system for organizing the source materials for his Dictionary. Henry Hitchings describes Johnson's method in Definining the World (2005):

When he identified a passage suitable for quotation, he underlined with a black pencil the word he meant it to illustrate, marked the beginning and end of the passage with vertical strokes, and wrote the initial letter of the chosen word in the margin. Working in pairs, the amanuenses would then go over the books Johnson had marked. Each time one of them came to a marked passage, he would transcribe it on to a quarto sheet and strike out the marginal letter. . . . The quotations were set out in columns, and, once full, the quarto sheets were cut up into slips, each bearing a single quotation. These copy slips were kept in bins, and arranged in alphabetical order by the amaneuenses. As work proceeded, the juggling of copy slips unfortunately allowed some of the illustrations to be lost. We can see evidence of this occasionally in the finished Dictionary. Explaining one sense of the verb "to cream," Johnson says is "used somewhere by Swift," while another word, "dripple," is "used somewhere by Fairfax."

Of course, even the best scheme and the most ingenious book furniture won’t avail in those situations where the information one desires is simply not there, as Guy Davenport laments in "Dictionary":

Some years ago, on a particularly distraught evening, the drift of things into chaos was precipitated by my consulting Webster's Third International for the word Mauser. All I wanted to know was whether it sported an umlaut or not. It wasn't there. I paid $47.50 for my Webster's; it weighs as much as a six-year-old girl; and I had to build a table for it, as it is too bulky to go into a bookshelf, and will anyway come all to pieces unless it sits open day and night.

Perhaps we should just give up and move into Borges's Library of Babel, where we accept a life of isolation for the certainty that the knowledge we seek is in there, somewhere:

There is no combination of characters one can make--dhcmrlchtdj, for example--that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies. This pointless, verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five bookshelves in one of the countless hexagons--as does its refutation.

To be honest, that probably is where we belong, immured in the endless library. Even the fact that we're worrying about these organizational problems at all suggests that we fit the pejorative connotation that Dr. Johnson ascribes to the term "booklearned":

Versed in books, or literature: a term implying some slight contempt.

To back up his assertion, Johnson turns--this time with attribution in hand--to a sharp little line from Jonathan Swift:

He will quote passages out of Plato and Pindar, at his own table, to some booklearned companion, without blushing.

We book people can tell ourselves that an ingenious piece of furniture may be all we need to establish order, but we know better. Entropy and its constant companion infinitude will never leave off plaguing us.

From Certain of the Chronicles, by Levi Stahl:

After a long night, I have at times slipped into dreams wherein I wander a vast ship full of books, shelves as numerous as the waves of the ocean, floors as many as the footsteps on a mountain, all unread, pages uncut, unknown. I know in my heart that I can find my way out, but I fear in my soul that I cannot find my way in.

On libraries

From Jorge Luis Borges's "The Library of Babel" (1941)

The Universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below--one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first--identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer form this mirror that the library is not infinite--if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication. I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. . . . Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compasionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Library is endless.

Busy today, so all I've got for you is a couple of bits I've come across lately about libraries. Borges's infinite library that is the universe seems a good lead into a bit from John Crowley's Aegypt (1987), on the role of distant libraries in forging in the main character, Pierce, a lifelong obsession with mythical, mystical, shadowy pasts:

Such was the family Pierce was to make his way in; in their isolation they were like some antique family of gentry, in the specialness of their circumstances like foreigners living within a pale. It was only the Oliphant children who were taught by the priest's sister; only the Oliphants (as far as Pierce knew) who every month received from the state library in far-off, blue grass-green Lexington, a box of books. . . . Every month the read books were packed up and shipped back, and on receipt another box would be sent, more or less filling the vague requests on the Oliphants' list (Mother West-wind, more horse stories, "something about masonry," anything of Trollope's) and picked up at the post office, and opened in excitement and disappointment mixed, Christmas every month. Pierce remembering his confusion and contempt before this bizarre system--bizarre to a child who had had the vast, the virtually illimitable reaches of the Brooklyn Public to wander in, his father went every two weeks and Pierce had always gone with him and could have any book he pointed at--Pierce remembering those battered library boxes wondered if it had been they, those librarians or whoever they were who had filled them, who by sending him some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country, that far old country that was sort of Egypt but not Egypt, no, not Egypt at all, a country with a different history, whose name was spelled too with a small but crucial difference: it was not Egypt but Aegypt.

The small town I grew up in had an old Carnegie library, but its offerings were necessarily limited, and we, too, relied on similarly vague requests sent off to larger libraries in other towns and cities. Now I'm spoiled, living half a block from a branch of the Chicago Public Library and also having access to a major research library. Almost anything I want is available--though sometimes just barely. When I decided earlier this week that I couldn't really approach Endless Things (2007), the final volume of John Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy, without revisiting the first three, which are out of print, I was surprised to find that the Chicago Public Library system only has three copies of each--and one was checked out, presumably in the hands of a Crowley fan who, having the same idea I had, was quicker on the draw. Maybe the uniform paperback editions that Overlook is bringing out in the autumn will inspire the library to increase its holdings.

As regular readers know, I'm at heart more of a book buyer than book borrower, but I still make fairly regular use of the local library. It's particularly good for a summer Saturday afternoon when nothing on my shelves seems right; I can head out to the library confident that within ten minutes I can be back in my chair with a good mystery novel or two. People have of course been using libraries in that way--to pick up a quick bit of pleasurable reading--since they were invented. John Brewer describes a couple of early libraries in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997):

The largest circulating libraries were more than adjuncts to a bookselling business. In the capitals of the three kingdoms, in the large provincial towns and in resorts such as Bath and Margate, circulating libraries offered comfortable, spacious surroundings in which customers could gossip, flirt, browse, examine newspapers and reviews, and choose from a selection of every kind of book. The late eighteenth-century engraving of the library at Margate, sold jointly by its proprietor and engraver, conveys the ambience library proprietors wanted: one of leisure and display as well as learning.



The biggest libraries published catalogues: John Bell's famous London Library contained more than 8,000 volumes; Sibbald's in Edinburgh offered its patrons a choice of 6,000 titles in 1786; and Ann Ireland's Leicester Library, though not as large a Barber's in Newcastle, nevertheless housed 2,500 books. These libraries were not only repositories of fiction. The number of novels and romances was never as great as those of history, travel, and geography; indeed for every "frivolous" volume there were two of more serious reading matter. But these figures refer to books on the shelf: no records survive to reveal the pattern of borrowing in a major circulating library. It may well have been that the sober histories and detailed travellers' tales never received a second glance as readers hurried to the shelves of multi-volumed novels and well-thumbed romances. Isaac Cruikshank's The Circulating Library certainly takes this view.



The shelves for novels, tales and romances are empty--all the books are out--but the sections for history, sermons, voyages and travels are full, attesting to their unpopularity.

That was before libraries had learned to stock multiple copies of the most popular trashy books: the Chicago Public Library has, according to their online catalog, 26 copies of The Da Vinci Code (2004), about half of which are available right now for checkout.

It seems unlikely that any trashy books marred the shelves of the library John Stow describes here in his A Survey of London (1598):

Joceline of Furness writeth, that Thean, the first Archbishop of London, in the reign of Lucius, built the said church by the aid of Ciran, chief butler to King Lucius; and also that Eluanus, the second archbishop, built a library to the same adjoining, and converted many of the Druids, learned men in the pagan law.

Just think of the splendid confusion a time traveler could create by stealing on of Chicago Public's extra copies of The Da Vinci Code and slipping it into the stacks of Eluanus's library. By the time the historical ripples reached the present, Dan Brown's faux-scholarly mishmash might actually have created the sort of secret societies it purports to uncover--though I suppose even Druids might find his characters and sentences a bit wooden.

But people do enjoy fluff and trash, and I'm not one to deny anyone pleasure from books, of whatever kind. I think D. J. Enright, in Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1987), gets at least part of it right:

A love of literature, Virginia Woolf wrote, is often roused and initially nourished, not by good books but by bad ones. "It will be an ill day when all the reading is done in libraries and none of it in tubes." And vice versa, too.

Interplay, too, is out of print, and obscure enough as to be missing from most library collections. But a commonplace book, being a bedside and armchair companion, is best owned rather than borrowed anyway--and there an Enright fan is in luck: searchable used bookstore inventories have made it readily available to anyone anywhere.

And, as John Crowley clearly understands, there are few things more inherently exciting to a reader than getting a box of books in the mail.