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William Ewart Gladstone >> On Books and the Housing of Them
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ON BOOKS AND THE HOUSING OF THEM
BY William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898)
In the old age of his intellect (which at
this point seemed to taste a little of
decrepitude), Strauss declared [1] that the doctrine of
immortality has recently lost the assistance
of a passable argument, inasmuch as it has
been discovered that the stars are inhabited;
for where, he asks, could room now be found
for such a multitude of souls? Again, in view
of the current estimates of prospective
population for this earth, some people have begun to
entertain alarm for the probable condition of
England (if not Great Britain) when she gets
(say) seventy millions that are allotted to her
against six or eight hundred millions for the
United States. We have heard in some
systems of the pressure of population upon food;
but the idea of any pressure from any
quarter upon space is hardly yet familiar. Still, I
suppose that many a reader must have been
struck with the naive simplicity of the hyperbole
of St. John, [2] perhaps a solitary unit of its
kind in the New Testament: "the which if
they should be written every one, I suppose
that even the world itself could not contain
the books that should be written."
A book, even Audubon (I believe the biggest
known), is smaller than a man; but, in relation
to space, I entertain more proximate
apprehension of pressure upon available space from
the book population than from the numbers of
mankind. We ought to recollect, with more
of a realized conception than we commonly
attain to, that a book consists, like a man,
from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and
a soul. They are not always proportionate to
each other. Nay, even the different members
of the book-body do not sing, but clash, when
bindings of a profuse costliness are imposed,
as too often happens in the case of Bibles and
books of devotion, upon letter-press which is
respectable journeyman's work and nothing
more. The men of the Renascence had a
truer sense of adaptation; the age of jewelled
bindings was also the age of illumination and
of the beautiful miniatura, which at an earlier
stage meant side or margin art,[3] and then, on
account of the small portraitures included in
it, gradually slid into the modern sense of
miniature. There is a caution which we ought
to carry with us more and more as we get in
view of the coming period of open book trade,
and of demand practically boundless. Noble
works ought not to be printed in mean and
worthless forms, and cheapness ought to be
limited by an instinctive sense and law of
fitness. The binding of a book is the dress
with which it walks out into the world. The
paper, type and ink are the body, in which its
soul is domiciled. And these three, soul, body,
and habilament, are a triad which ought to be
adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony
and good sense.
Already the increase of books is passing into
geometrical progression. And this is not a
little remarkable when we bear in mind that
in Great Britain, of which I speak, while there
is a vast supply of cheap works, what are
termed "new publications" issue from the
press, for the most part, at prices fabulously
high, so that the class of real purchasers
has been extirpated, leaving behind as buyers
only a few individuals who might almost be
counted on the fingers, while the effective
circulation depends upon middle-men through the
engine of circulating libraries. These are not
so much owners as distributers of books, and
they mitigate the difficulty of dearness by
subdividing the cost, and then selling such copies
as are still in decent condition at a large
reduction. It is this state of things, due, in my
opinion, principally to the present form of the
law of copyright, which perhaps may have
helped to make way for the satirical (and
sometimes untrue) remark that in times of distress
or pressure men make their first economies on
their charities, and their second on their books.
The annual arrivals at the Bodleian Library
are, I believe, some twenty thousand; at the
British Museum, forty thousand, sheets of all
kinds included. Supposing three-fourths of
these to be volumes, of one size or another,
and to require on the average an inch of
shelf space, the result will be that in every
two years nearly a mile of new shelving will
be required to meet the wants of a single
library. But, whatever may be the present
rate of growth, it is small in comparison with
what it is likely to become. The key of the
question lies in the hands of the United
Kingdom and the United States jointly. In
this matter there rests upon these two Powers
no small responsibility. They, with their vast
range of inhabited territory, and their unity
of tongue, are masters of the world, which
will have to do as they do. When the
Britains and America are fused into one book
market; when it is recognized that letters,
which as to their material and their aim are
a high-soaring profession, as to their mere
remuneration are a trade; when artificial
fetters are relaxed, and printers, publishers, and
authors obtain the reward which well-regulated
commerce would afford them, then let
floors beware lest they crack, and walls lest
they bulge and burst, from the weight of
books they will have to carry and to confine.
It is plain, for one thing, that under the
new state of things specialism, in the future,
must more and more abound. But specialism
means subdivision of labor; and with
subdivision labor ought to be more completely,
more exactly, performed. Let us bow our
heads to the inevitable; the day of
encyclopaedic learning has gone by. It may perhaps
be said that that sun set with Leibnitz.
But as little learning is only dangerous when
it forgets that it is little, so specialism is
only dangerous when it forgets that it is
special. When it encroaches on its betters,
when it claims exceptional certainty or
honor, it is impertinent, and should be rebuked;
but it has its own honor in its own
province, and is, in any case, to be preferred to
pretentious and flaunting sciolism.
A vast, even a bewildering prospect is
before us, for evil or for good; but for good,
unless it be our own fault, far more than for
evil. Books require no eulogy from me; none
could be permitted me, when they already
draw their testimonials from Cicero[4] and
Macaulay.[5] But books are the voices of the
dead. They are a main instrument of
communion with the vast human procession of
the other world. They are the allies of the
thought of man. They are in a certain sense
at enmity with the world. Their work is, at
least, in the two higher compartments of our
threefold life. In a room well filled with
them, no one has felt or can feel solitary.
Second to none, as friends to the individual,
they are first and foremost among the compages,
the bonds and rivets of the race,
onward from that time when they were first
written on the tablets of Babylonia and
Assyria, the rocks of Asia minor, and the
monuments of Egypt, down to the diamond
editions of Mr. Pickering and Mr. Frowde.[6]
It is in truth difficult to assign dimensions
for the libraries of the future. And it is also
a little touching to look back upon those of
the past. As the history of bodies cannot,
in the long run, be separated from the history
of souls, I make no apology for saying a few
words on the libraries which once were, but
which have passed away.
The time may be approaching when we
shall be able to estimate the quantity of book
knowledge stored in the repositories of those
empires which we call prehistoric. For the
present, no clear estimate even of the great
Alexandrian Libraries has been brought
within the circle of popular knowledge; but it
seems pretty clear that the books they
contained were reckoned, at least in the
aggregate, by hundreds of thousands.[7] The form
of the book, however, has gone through many
variations; and we moderns have a great
advantage in the shape which the exterior
has now taken. It speaks to us symbolically
by the title on its back, as the roll of
parchment could hardly do. It is established that
in Roman times the bad institution of slavery
ministered to a system under which books
were multiplied by simultaneous copying in a
room where a single person read aloud in the
hearing of many the volume to be
reproduced, and that so produced they were
relatively cheap. Had they not been so, they
would hardly have been, as Horace represents
them, among the habitual spoils of the grocer.[8]
It is sad, and is suggestive of many
inquiries, that this abundance was followed,
at least in the West, by a famine of more
than a thousand years. And it is hard, even
after all allowances, to conceive that of all
the many manuscripts of Homer which Italy
must have possessed we do not know that a
single parchment or papyrus was ever read
by a single individual, even in a convent, or
even by a giant such as Dante, or as Thomas
Acquinas, the first of them unquestionably
master of all the knowledge that was within
the compass of his age. There were,
however, libraries even in the West, formed by
Charlemagne and by others after him. We
are told that Alcuin, in writing to the great
monarch, spoke with longing of the relative
wealth of England in these precious estates.
Mr. Edwards, whom I have already quoted,
mentions Charles the Fifth of France, in 1365,
as a collector of manuscripts. But some ten
years back the Director of the Bibliotheque
Nationale informed me that the French King
John collected twelve hundred manuscripts,
at that time an enormous library, out of which
several scores were among the treasures in
his care. Mary of Medicis appears to have
amassed in the sixteenth century, probably
with far less effort, 5,800 volumes.[9] Oxford
had before that time received noble gifts for
her University Library. And we have to
recollect with shame and indignation that
that institution was plundered and destroyed
by the Commissioners of the boy King
Edward the Sixth, acting in the name of the
Reformation of Religion. Thus it happened
that opportunity was left to a private
individual, the munificent Sir Thomas Bodley, to
attach an individual name to one of the
famous libraries of the world. It is interesting
to learn that municipal bodies have a share
in the honor due to monasteries and
sovereigns in the collection of books; for the
Common Council of Aix purchased books for a
public library in 1419.[10]
Louis the Fourteenth, of evil memory, has
at least this one good deed to his credit, that
he raised the Royal Library at Paris, founded
two centuries before, to 70,000 volumes. In
1791 it had 150,000 volumes. It profited largely
by the Revolution. The British Museum had
only reached 115,000 when Panizzi became
keeper in 1837. Nineteen years afterward he
left it with 560,000, a number which must now
have more than doubled. By his noble design
for occupying the central quadrangle, a desert
of gravel until his time, he provided additional
room for 1,200,000 volumes. All this
apparently enormous space for development is being
eaten up with fearful rapidity; and such is the
greed of the splendid library that it opens its
jaws like Hades, and threatens shortly to
expel the antiquities from the building, and
appropriate the places they adorn.
But the proper office of hasty retrospect in
a paper like this is only to enlarge by degrees,
like the pupil of an eye, the reader's
contemplation and estimate of the coming time, and
to prepare him for some practical suggestions
of a very humble kind. So I take up again
the thread of my brief discourse. National
libraries draw upon a purse which is
bottomless. But all public libraries are not national.
And the case even of private libraries is
becoming, nay, has become, very serious for all
who are possessed by the inexorable spirit of
collection, but whose ardor is perplexed and
qualified, or even baffled, by considerations
springing from the balance-sheet.
The purchase of a book is commonly
supposed to end, even for the most scrupulous
customer, with the payment of the bookseller's
bill. But this is a mere popular superstition.
Such payment is not the last, but the first
term in a series of goodly length. If we wish
to give to the block a lease of life equal to
that of the pages, the first condition is that it
should be bound. So at least one would have
said half a century ago. But, while books
are in the most instances cheaper, binding,
from causes which I do not understand, is
dearer, at least in England, than it was in my
early years, so that few can afford it.[11] We
have, however, the tolerable and very useful
expedient of cloth binding (now in some
danger, I fear, of losing its modesty through
flaring ornamentation) to console us. Well,
then, bound or not, the book must of
necessity be put into a bookcase. And the
bookcase must be housed. And the house must
be kept. And the library must be dusted,
must be arranged, should be catalogued. What
a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil! Unless
indeed things are to be as they now are in
at least one princely mansion of this country,
where books, in thousands upon thousands,
are jumbled together with no more
arrangement than a sack of coals; where not even
the sisterhood of consecutive volumes has
been respected; where undoubtedly an
intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune
take something from the shelves that is a
book; but where no particular book can
except by the purest accident, be found.
Such being the outlook, what are we to do
with our books? Shall we be buried under
them like Tarpeia under the Sabine shields?
Shall we renounce them (many will, or will
do worse, will keep to the most worthless
part of them) in our resentment against their
more and more exacting demands? Shall we
sell and scatter them? as it is painful to see
how often the books of eminent men are
ruthlessly, or at least unhappily, dispersed
on their decease. Without answering in
detail, I shall assume that the book-buyer is a
book-lover, that his love is a tenacious, not
a transitory love, and that for him the
question is how best to keep his books.
I pass over those conditions which are the
most obvious, that the building should be
sound and dry, the apartment airy, and with
abundant light. And I dispose with a passing
anathema of all such as would endeavour to
solve their problem, or at any rate
compromise their difficulties, by setting one row
of books in front of another. I also freely
admit that what we have before us is not
a choice between difficulty and no difficulty,
but a choice among difficulties.
The objects further to be contemplated in
the bestowal of our books, so far as I
recollect, are three: economy, good arrangement,
and accessibility with the smallest possible
expenditure of time.
In a private library, where the service of
books is commonly to be performed by the
person desiring to use them, they ought to be
assorted and distributed according to subject.
The case may be altogether different where
they have to be sent for and brought by an
attendant. It is an immense advantage to
bring the eye in aid of the mind; to see
within a limited compass all the works that
are accessible, in a given library, on a given
subject; and to have the power of dealing
with them collectively at a given spot, instead
of hunting them up through an entire
accumulation. It must be admitted, however, that
distribution by subjects ought in some degree
to be controlled by sizes. If everything on a
given subject, from folio down to 32mo, is to
be brought locally together, there will be an
immense waste of space in the attempt to
lodge objects of such different sizes in one
and the same bookcase. And this waste of
space will cripple us in the most serious
manner, as will be seen with regard to the
conditions of economy and of accessibility.
The three conditions are in truth all
connected together, but especially the two last
named.
Even in a paper such as this the question
of classification cannot altogether be
overlooked; but it is one more easy to open than
to close -- one upon which I am not bold
enough to hope for uniformity of opinion and
of practice. I set aside on the one hand the
case of great public libraries, which I leave
to the experts of those establishments. And,
at the other end of the scale, in small private
libraries the matter becomes easy or even
insignificant. In libraries of the medium scale,
not too vast for some amount of personal
survey, some would multiply subdivision, and
some restrain it. An acute friend asks me
under what and how many general headings
subjects should be classified in a library
intended for practical use and reading, and
boldly answers by suggesting five classes
only: (1) science, (2) speculation, (3) art,
(4) history, and (5) miscellaneous and
periodical literature. But this seemingly simple
division at once raises questions both of
practical and of theoretic difficulty. As to the
last, periodical literature is fast attaining to
such magnitude, that it may require a
classification of its own, and that the enumeration
which indexes supply, useful as it is, will not
suffice. And I fear it is the destiny of
periodicals as such to carry down with them a
large proportion of what, in the phraseology
of railways, would be called dead weight, as
compared with live weight. The limits of
speculation would be most difficult to draw.
The diversities included under science would
be so vast as at once to make sub-
classification a necessity. The olog-ies are by no means
well suited to rub shoulders together; and
sciences must include arts, which are but
country cousins to them, or a new
compartment must be established for their
accomodation. Once more, how to cope with the
everlasting difficulty of 'Works'? In what
category to place Dante, Petrarch,
Swedenborg, Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, or a hundred
more? Where, again, is Poetry to stand?
I apprehend that it must take its place, the
first place without doubt, in Art; for while it
is separated from Painting and her other
'sphere-born harmonious sisters' by their
greater dependence on material forms they are all
more inwardly and profoundly united in their
first and all-enfolding principle, which is to
organize the beautiful for presentation to the
perceptions of man.
But underneath all particular criticism of
this or that method of classification will be
found to lie a subtler question -- whether the
arrangement of a library ought not in some
degree to correspond with and represent the
mind of the man who forms it. For my own
part, I plead guilty, within certain limits, of
favoritism in classification. I am sensible
that sympathy and its reverse have something
to do with determining in what company a
book shall stand. And further, does there
not enter into the matter a principle of
humanity to the authors themselves? Ought
we not to place them, so far as may be, in
the neighborhood which they would like?
Their living manhoods are printed in their
works. Every reality, every tendency, endures.
Eadem sequitur tellure sepultos.
I fear that arrangement, to be good, must
be troublesome. Subjects are traversed by
promiscuous assemblages of 'works;' both by
sizes; and all by languages. On the whole
I conclude as follows. The mechanical
perfection of a library requires an alphabetical
catalogue of the whole. But under the shadow
of this catalogue let there be as many living
integers as possible, for every well-chosen
subdivision is a living integer and makes the
library more and more an organism. Among
others I plead for individual men as centres
of subdivision: not only for Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, but for Johnson, Scott, and
Burns, and whatever represents a large and
manifold humanity.
The question of economy, for those who
from necessity or choice consider it at all, is
a very serious one. It has been a fashion to
make bookcases highly ornamental. Now
books want for and in themselves no
ornament at all. They are themselves the
ornament. Just as shops need no ornament,
and no one will think of or care for any
structural ornament, if the goods are
tastefully disposed in the shop-window. The man
who looks for society in his books will
readily perceive that, in proportion as the face of
his bookcase is occupied by ornament, he
loses that society; and conversely, the more
that face approximates to a sheet of
bookbacks, the more of that society he will enjoy.
And so it is that three great advantages come
hand in hand, and, as will be seen, reach
their maximum together: the sociability of
books, minimum of cost in providing for
them, and ease of access to them.
In order to attain these advantages, two
conditions are fundamental. First, the shelves
must, as a rule, be fixed; secondly, the cases,
or a large part of them, should have their
side against the wall, and thus, projecting
into the room for a convenient distance, they
should be of twice the depth needed for a
single line of books, and should hold two
lines, one facing each way. Twelve inches
is a fair and liberal depth for two rows of
octavos. The books are thus thrown into
stalls, but stalls after the manner of a stable,
or of an old-fashioned coffee-room; not after
the manner of a bookstall, which, as times
go, is no stall at all, but simply a flat space
made by putting some scraps of boarding
together, and covering them with books.
This method of dividing the longitudinal
space by projections at right angles to it, if
not very frequently used, has long been
known. A great example of it is to be found
in the noble library of Trinity College,
Cambridge, and is the work of Sir Christopher
Wren. He has kept these cases down to
very moderate height, for he doubtless took
into account that great heights require long
ladders, and that the fetching and use of
these greatly add to the time consumed in
getting or in replacing a book. On the other
hand, the upper spaces of the walls are
sacrificed, whereas in Dublin, All Souls, and
many other libraries the bookcases ascend
very high, and magnificent apartments walled
with books may in this way be constructed.
Access may be had to the upper portions by
galleries; but we cannot have stairs all round
the room, and even with one gallery of books
a room should not be more than from
sixteen to eighteen feet high if we are to act on
the principle of bringing the largest possible
number of volumes into the smallest possible
space. I am afraid it must be admitted that
we cannot have a noble and imposing
spectacle, in a vast apartment, without sacrificing
economy and accessibility; and vice versa.
The projections should each have attached
to them what I rudely term an endpiece (for
want of a better name), that is, a shallow
and extremely light adhering bookcase (light
by reason of the shortness of the shelves),
which both increases the accommodation, and
makes one short side as well as the two long
ones of the parallelopiped to present simply
a face of books with the lines of shelf, like
threads, running between the rows.
The wall-spaces between the projections
ought also to be turned to account for
shallow bookcases, so far as they are not
occupied by windows. If the width of the interval
be two feet six, about sixteen inches of this
may be given to shallow cases placed against
the wall.
Economy of space is in my view best
attained by fixed shelves. This dictum I will
now endeavor to make good. If the shelves
are movable, each shelf imposes a dead
weight on the structure of the bookcase,
without doing anything to support it. Hence
it must be built with wood of considerable
mass, and the more considerable the mass
of wood the greater are both the space
occupied and the ornament needed. When the
shelf is fixed, it contributes as a fastening to
hold the parts of the bookcase together; and
a very long experience enables me to say
that shelves of from half- to three-quarters of
an inch worked fast into uprights of from
three-quarters to a full inch will amply suffice
for all sizes of books except large and heavy
folios, which would probably require a small,
and only a small, addition of thickness.
I have recommended that as a rule the
shelves be fixed, and have given reasons for
the adoption of such a rule. I do not know
whether it will receive the sanction of
authorities. And I make two admissions. First,
it requires that each person owning and
arranging a library should have a pretty
accurate general knowledge of the sizes of his
books. Secondly, it may be expedient to
introduce here and there, by way of exception,
a single movable shelf; and this, I believe,
will be found to afford a margin sufficient to
meet occasional imperfections in the
computation of sizes. Subject to these remarks, I
have considerable confidence in the
recommendation I have made.
I will now exhibit to my reader the
practical effect of such arrangement, in bringing
great numbers of books within easy reach.
Let each projection be three feet long, twelve
inches deep (ample for two faces of octavos),
and nine feet high, so that the upper shelf
can be reached by the aid of a wooden stool
of two steps not more than twenty inches
high, and portable without the least effort in
a single hand. I will suppose the wall space
available to be eight feet, and the projections,
three in number, with end pieces need only
jut out three feet five, while narrow strips of
bookcase will run up the wall between the
projections. Under these conditions, the
bookcases thus described will carry above
2,000 octavo volumes.