The dirty books in the library tower

Every Cambridge undergraduate, as well as a fair few of the dons, believes that the University Library stores its collection of pornography in the tower. It’s a myth encouraged, I suspect, by the distinctively phallic shape of this structure, which rises almost twenty floors over the main entrance to the Library.

But it is just a myth. I now know that the tower contains something much more exciting than pornography – and something more exciting than its title, “The Supplementary Collection”, would hint.

Cambridge, like the Bodleian, the British Library and a few others, is what is known as a Legal Deposit Library, which means that since the eighteenth century it has received a copy of every book published in the country. Nineteenth-century academic librarians operated a hard-line policy on these books: those that were considered “academic” were fully catalogued and put into the main system; the rest (from school textbooks through Christmas annuals to board games and Penny Dreadfuls) were put into the B stream, with just a rudimentary hand-written slip for a catalogue entry.

When in the 1930s the Library moved into its new Giles Gilbert Scott, industrial-style, building, the B stream was lodged in the tower – which I visited for the first time a few days ago. It was an utterly memorable occasion, and not just for the lift getting stuck repeatedly on the way up!

The occasion for the visit was a meeting of two Cambridge projects. For the University Library has just secured a very large grant indeed from the Mellon Foundation to make a proper catalogue of all the nineteenth century books in the tower – now a potential goldmine for researchers, partly because they were “non-academic” in the eyes of those early librarians. At the same time, ten minutes walk away Library, a group of historians, classicists and literary specialists – me included – have won another very large grant indeed from the Leverhulme Trust to investigate changing ideas of history and the past in the nineteenth century.

Thinking that much important material for us must be up the tower, we paid a visit and were kindly shown round by the head of the Tower Project, Vanessa Lacey (originally a classicist).

It was mind blowing. There are fabulous views over Cambridge (which would have been even better if they had ever sussed how to clean the windows). But more interesting for us were the rows and rows of dusty but mint condition, “low-brow” publications, sorted not by subject at all, but simply by size and date. It was, as one of my colleagues nicely observed, like walking into a book shop of an earlier era.

Many of these had the kind of title which instantly evokes the reading culture of the past: A Good Boy’s Diary (by the author of A Bad Boy’s Diary); The Little Savage and Captured by Cannibals (neither of which would be allowed in a multi-cultural  primary school today); and more handbooks on home pet care than I could ever imagined the Victorians could consume.

But I was particularly interested, of course, in those with a classical theme. I’m hoping to use our Leverhulme project to write about the ways those outside the “elite’ explored and enjoyed the classical world in the nineteenth century. I’m fed up with the constantly repeated falsehood that Greece and Rome did not impact then on anyone below the upper middle-class; indeed that its study was an elitist, imperialist conspiracy designed to keep 95% of the population in their place. So I homed in on all those boyish novels about legionary life on the German frontier, Andrew Haggard’s wonderful Hannibal’s Daughter , and Charlotte M Yonge’s Aunt Charlotte’s Stories of Roman History for the Little Ones. I should have known about these before (they are mostly listed in online bibliographies of fiction set in Greece and Rome). But I confess I didn’t – and anyway spotting them on the shelves makes the discovery all the more vivid.

I foresee spending rather more time in the tower over the next year or so. Perhaps I’ll then find out where they actually keep the pornography.

Comments

[Alex Drace-Francis]

ok, so my syntax was a bit continental and my apostrophizing a bit forward, & I'm grateful in the circumstances for any attempt to wrestle with my earnest query, but did I really deserve a pre-1914 suppository anecdote? I thought this blog was supposed to be about repositories, not suppositories. We're getting way off topic here.

[Oliver Nicholson]

Sorry to disappoint you, Alex, but I am a non-smoker. Know not I do how much regional variation in the old Latin pronunciation there was (why do I like Yoda write ?). Presumably schoolmasters had a formative influence, and I have been told that in Scotland the dominies promoted a pronunciation of various Latin vowels different from that in England. Though my father (who read medicine at Edinburgh just before the First War) told a story which would work in the English pronunciation as well. One of his Materia Medica professors is said to have given the instruction "Fac suppositorium hujus magnitudinis", and to have complained when he got the results "Some of you gentlemen seem to have been under the impression that this meant 'Make a suppository of a huge magnitude'".
I sometimes wonder if my prep. school was one of the last places still to be teaching the old Greek pronunciation (Hoe, Hee, Toe, Tontine, Toe) in 1957-63. Our Latin was the Restored 'dago-talk' (as Churchill called it in a witty conversation with A.P. Herbert recorded in the latter's Independent Member).

[Alex Drace-Francis]

ye various kings of orient & occident,
presumably you have weighed in your wisdom the scousographic dimension namely the birkenheadean education of for-granted-taken national poet. WO welsh-liverpool educated how mouthed he latin? oxbridgeously? pt that in yr pipe&smokeit, alex

[Oliver Nicholson]

Thank you, Gavin. Mori, like the poll.
I recall a TLS correspondence some years ago when someone suggested that the lines 'O frabjous day Callooh, Callay' were a compliment by Lewis Carroll to Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church and father of Alice because they could be rendered roughly as 'for the beautiful daughter of a beautiful man'. The correspondence ended when it was pointed out that Lewis Carroll would have pronounced that Callow Callee.

[Gavin Kelly]

With reference to Oliver Nicholson's point rather than dirty books... Tracing the history of English pronunciation of Latin through rhymes in English poetry might be (quite) interesting; but Wilfred Owen seems to have intended 'mori' to rhyme with glory, not with lie (hypercorrect reformed pronunciation would rhyme it with sorry). The poem ends:

... My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
That old lie: dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

[Francis Tuttle]

That hadn't occurred to me, Oliver. Yes, Owen was writing before the pronunciation reform. And I'm sure your surmise is right on the demise of spoken Latin. After all, most, if not all, languages like to assimilate foreign words to their own phonology.

[Peter Taylor]

Mary, did you also discover the reason that there's always a light in the topmost window?

[Oliver Nicholson]

Interesting too that the Wilfrid Owen couplet rhymes only in the old English pronunciation of Latin, last publicly used by. H. MacMillan as Chancellor of Oxford. It's the same with the lines of H. Newbolt:
Qui procul hinc, the legend's writ,
The frontier grave is far away,
Qui ante diem periit
Sed miles, sed pro patria.
To what extent, one wonders, did the 'restored pronunciation' help drive Latin out of common English speech ? Should Byrd be sung in English Latin ? Messiaen can sound most mysterious if you pronounce his Latin as if you were Inspector Clouseau - "O magnum mysterium - do you have rhoom'

[Yogi Bear]

So what happened at the other libraries that got all these books?

[Nessie]

Do they have room for a tent? I wanna move in. Sounds like heaven.

[Sarah]

Dear Ms. Beard
I read everything you write with pleasure;
I also enjoy the comments on your views.
Thank you, Sarah

[Francis Tuttle]

I’m fed up with the constantly repeated falsehood that Greece and Rome did not impact then on anyone below the upper middle-class; indeed that its study was an elitist, imperialist conspiracy designed to keep 95% of the population in their place.

Yes, you're right Mary. Even today, many readers point to Wilfred Owen's famous lines ...the old Lie:/Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as a denunciation exclusively of the upper-class world view. In fact, Niall Ferguson's studies on WWI have demonstrated that all classes were infused with a fiery patriotic, nationalist sense, of a very similar tone to the Horatian verse, as have German documents from the same period. Many angry German soldiers, who couldn't understand the armistice, believing they could still win, later came to form the backbone of the early nationalist movements in the 20s.

[Richard A. Diehl]

As fellow academics, my wife and (both Mesoamerican archaelogists and heirs to a rich and exponentially expanding literature) know the dangers of endless seduction by the next book in the stack(s). Never give to being a sponge, always return something on some level.

[Jackie]

I know Mary. For me it's a bit like setting out on a journey with a vague idea where I want to get to, but only half an idea of how I intend to get there! But the distractions of all those wonderful books.....?!

[Monica]

I have to say I'm quite green with envy! Hidden nineteenth-century stuff and Classics?? It's a dream come true--and two of my favourite periods. I hope you keep us posted with your findings!

[Mary]

To reply to each of those:

Jackie...you have to start writing before you think you are quite ready, or you never do!
Alex...glad they were nice to you; you shoud come again.
postblogger...well i wont be able to keep it to myself.

[postblogger]

On a personal (and extremely shallow) note, when you DO find out where the pornography is kept, could you please post about that? In extensive detail, if at all possible...

[Alex Drace-Francis]

There's a sense, I suppose in which all research is porn, since it operates on the premise of uncovering the covered-up. Coincidentally a colleague sent me today a very interesting article on precisely this theme, detailing ways in which gendered notions of (e.g.) 'virginal' archives were written into nineteenth-century historical practice (Bonnie Smith, American Historical Review, 1995).
But to one who graduated in Norwich, Cambridge always retained a reputation for iciness ('Never really recovered from the Jurassic Era', I remember someone saying). I only went to that Library once & had to fill in an extraordinarily provincial form which asked which College I was a member of. To her credit, the woman didn't bat an eyelid when I expounded the possibility of coming from elsewhere & knowing how to read...

[Jackie]

I have just one question to ask Mary, when will you find time to actually write anything? There must be hundreds of wonderful books to explore! How long before the Trust expects to see some return for it's money?