Beware: tradesmen in the library

It only takes a quick visit to the Cambridge University Library to dispel any suspicion that the book is dead, or even approaching the last stages of terminal illness. The whole place is bursting at the seams with new accessions, which have now outgrown all the shelves and are spilling over onto tables, window-sills and even the floor.  All over the library you find little notes saying, helpfully, things like: “Classmark 534.6 c 95 continues on the table by the window”. I rather approve of all this (the UL is one of the few big libraries where a lot of the books are open to readers and don’t have to be ordered up from some compact-shelving dungeon) – but it does mean that the whole place is coming to look more and more like my own office. That is to say a bit of a mess.

I’ve just been spending a few rare days in the UL. Rare? Yes, and not only because I’ve been away for three months. Despite what you might enviously imagine about the working life of the average Cambridge don, I hardly ever get the time to go there during term. And even in the vacation, the excellent library in the Classics Faculty is only two minutes from my office and meets most of my needs. So some solid hours in the main library (the one with the “up yours” tower) seems quite a luxury.

The UL is a marvellous combination of high-tech library science (or “information science” I guess I should say) and some endearingly quaint old-fashioned habits.

There are great banks of computers for searching the catalogue in every way you can imagine. You can search for books written in Italian by people named Smith between 1930 and 1940 if you are so minded – which can occasionally come in handy (even though, as no librarian likes to admit, if you are just trying to find Syme’s Roman Revolution, or some such volume, it’s much quicker to do that with a card catalogue or guardbook than it ever is on a computer).

But underneath the swish machinery there’s still a formidable foundation of Victorian handwritten records. Today I had ordered up -- these weren’t on open shelves -- all the succeeding editions of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy from 1853 to the end of the century. (What I was doing with these, you’ll no doubt hear in due course.) They all arrived on my desk, apart from the second edition. And there was a suspicious gap in the class marks between 1 and 3. L576.d.6.1, L576.d.6.3, but no L576.d.6.2

When I queried this, the librarian offered to consult the “shelf list”. This involved no clicking of buttons, keys or mice. Instead he brought an old leather binder. Inside there were hundreds of handwritten pages. And turning to the page for the offending classmark, we looked at the individual entries for the accession of each new edition of the Handbook, written in scrawly fountain pen by underpaid Victorian clerks. Sure enough, there was a blank where L576.d.6.2 should have been. They never received it.

But it’s not just in the cataloguing that there’s a quaintly Victorian tinge. This afternoon I walked along one of the long library corridors, which had obviously been recently painted. In fact, the health-and-safety notice to warn readers of the potentially dangerous decorating work was still in place. Take care, it said, “tradesmen may be working above”. What other library in the world would still talk about “tradesmen”?

(PS. If you’ve enjoyed this good news blog about the survival of the book, you might enjoy this little video – courtesy of a friend at the Getty -- about the birth of the book)

Comments

[David Ganz]

Surely it is uncharitable to blame Oxford for the zealous music lover Ralph Leavis. Cambridge surely had some share in his making?

[Hein Maassen]

Dear Christopher, I did not meam books which have been digitalized in the Jurassic age of computing with some long-forgotten software programme on a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. They certainly pose a problem, but libraries are well aware of it and working on it. I mean books and periodicals which are available on-line, now, on your own computer at home. Their number is growing very fast. By the way, on-line access to the digitalized version of an old book in the BL would save me (I am Dutch) a long and expensive journey to and stay in London (although I like London very much)!

[Tony Francis]

When I was in grad school, they were talking about a "paperless society". One of my advisors said, "That is a bunch of crap... look at all this paper." He was pointing to a big printout from one of our computer runs. (It was hundreds of pages.) The feeling then was the more computers, the more generation of paper. I have noticed there are many books on line, but they seem to have whole sections that are not available. A 500 page book will be missing pages 100 to 450, for example. I have also noticed that several academic institutions will sell access to a paper. It is really expensive: $8 for a paper, that I wouldn't read if were free. Still, the access to info on the 'net is tremendous. One problem: everybody is an expert. It is hard to tell what has been peer reviewed, and what hasn't. Peer reviewed info in journals is frequently suspect. Wiki is really bad about this. Every moron is an expert there! (But you didn't hear it from me!)

[Christopher feeney]

A book published in 1797 (random date, no significance) is available to me to consult if I can get to the BL. A copy digitized in 1988 is inaccessible, because no one uses the same soft- or hardware now. Dear Hein, don't be previous.

[HEIN MAASSEN]

Well, I just was a bit ironical, Mary. But I really think an enormous revolution in the field of information research has been going on for at least 15 years or so already, and there is still no end in sight. It is great and it provides new opportunities. Don't miss it!

[FM]

The image of the (hopefully far-off) future Hein Maassen conjures is awful. No thanks - I'll have the germ-ridden, irritatingly-populated, dimly-lit and musty-smelling old library any day!

[Mary]

The trouble is that what Hein Maassen predicts as Nirvana (inless it's irony)...seems to me like hell. I LIKE going outside my front door, going into dusty bassements and leafing through old pages.

[A. Tulchin]

Mary Beard writes "the [Cambridge Univ. Library] is one of the few big libraries where a lot of the books are open to readers and don’t have to be ordered up from some compact-shelving dungeon." Well, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, UCLA, Chicago, Michigan, and almost every large American university library has open shelves. Most *European* libraries don't have open shelves, but most American ones do, with the notable exceptions of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.

[Hein Maassen (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, NL)]

Somewhere in the future all the world's books, newspapers, magazines etc. now in reading rooms or gathering dust in store rooms, will be digitalized and available on-line, with multiple search options. Even books your own library doesn't possess will be available on your own computer at home. Enjoy doing your research at home, sipping good coffee from your own mug. No more coughing, hiccuping, sneezing, whistling or otherwise offensive people next to you in chilly, smelly, ill-lit reading rooms. No more waiting for books which can only be obtained by ordering them from the national library of Kirgizistan, or which simply are just: "lost" in your own library. Soon to be enjoyed!

[Mary]

Richard is indeed right....and no doubt someone will fill us in on the true history of the fountain pen.

[Mark Thwaite]

"It only takes a quick visit to the Cambridge University Library to dispel any suspicion that the book is dead". True. And it only suffices to remember that 10,000 books are published every month in this country alone to know that the death of the book thesis is, at best, preposterously previous!

[anthony alcock]

Excellent video.
When I first went into the Bodleian, the first person I saw and talked to was the slightly deranged son of F.R. Leavis. I took him to be a typical product of Oxford, something I never quite managed to shake off during all the years I spent there.

[anon]

Teiresias would have fun with the book and the pen, Beard.

[Xjy]

Candidai, the "aura of a great library" comes from the fact that ideas don't smell, either ;-)

The beauty of a good private collection is the concentration of good bits.

A large public library (not to mention a copyright library) is like a vast public convenience with the stools of the nation (the world!) preserved on site for the pathologists of the future to wade through. A sort of closed-circuit sewer.

Poor bookworms!

But, of course, every time a pearl is found, the myth of eternal literature accretes another layer.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

The Bodleian Library in Oxford, which I take it corresponds to the Cambridge University Library, has quite a lot of books on open shelves, but as a general rule, one has to order books from the closed stacks without being able to browse in them first. It is impressive that the Cambridge Library is both a copyright library (or so I believe) and one with open stacks. The aura of a great library comes in part from the thinkers and writers who once read there.

[Richard]

Dear Mary,
A steel nib 'dip' pen, surely, for your Victorian clerk?
Best wishes, Richard.