The Mitchell Library... Andrew Carnegie, the Kelvingrove Fountain...

The Mitchell library was originally based on Ingram Street and was part of the bequest of another tobacco merchant, Stephen Mitchell, in 1877. The new building on North Street was financed by Andrew Carnegie who laid the foundation stone in 1907. Carnegie is another of those fascinating characters whose life-story reads like a Hollywood fantasy. He was born in Dunfermline and brought up in a small cottage which his family shared with another family. His father was a weaver and when the market for handloom weaving dried up his family income fell to subsistence level. They borrowed money and emigrated to Allegheny, New York. Andrew Carnegie was thirteen-years-old. By the time he died at the age of eighty-three, he had been the richest man in the world and despite giving away vast amounts of his fortune was still one of the richest men. One of the endowments he established was the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. In 1902, when the trust was established the endowment was £10 million – estimated to be over two hundred times the annual government funding of the Scottish Universities of the period which numbered only four – St. Andrews (Est. 1413), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (1495) and Edinburgh (1583). Adjusted by inflation, Carnegie's £10 million would, in 2022, be the equivalent of £1,309,646,260... and three pence. These days there are 15 Universities in Scotland, not including the Open University.  The last educational establishment in Scotland which gained University status was the University of the Highlands and Islands in 2011. Half of the Carnegie trust’s income is reserved for ‘the improvement and expansion of the Universities of Scotland’ with the other half for ‘the payment of fees of students of Scottish birth or extraction in respect of courses leading to a degree of a Scottish University’. Carnegie’s education was brief but better than many boys of his background, era and location, and took place at the Free School in Dunfermline, a school for the poor which had been a gift to the town by the philanthropist Adam Rolland. Perhaps it was Rolland’s example that inspired Carnegie in later life.

Adam Rolland by Sir Henry Raeburn

For a man of basic education, Carnegie appreciated literature and befriended Mark Twain, Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer as well as establishing at least 3000 public libraries in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries. By the time of his death it is estimated that he gave away the modern equivalent of $76.9 billion. On giving his great wealth away, Carnegie said; ‘The man who dies rich dies disgraced.’ Carnegie’s biographer, Burton J. Hendrick wrote that his donations ‘… represent all his personal tastes – his love of books, art, music, and nature – and the reforms which he regarded as most essential to human progress – scientific research, education both literary and technical, and, above all, the abolition of war. The expenditure the public most associates with Carnegie's name is that for public libraries.’ 

As well as having numerous biographies written about him, Carnegie wrote his autobiography which was first published in 1920, the year after his death.

Andrew Carnegie

The Mitchell Library contains approximately 1,213,000 volumes. The new building was opened in 1911 and the architect was William B. Whitie, who won the competition for its design. It was designed in what is known as the Edwardian Baroque style. Whitie narrowly won the competition and had originally been joint-winner with John Arthur. Whitie’s design, which did not include its famous dome at the time, was considered severe while Arthur’s was of Renaissance design and considered ‘freer and lighter’. Fortunately for Whitie, the judge of the competition was A. B. McDonald, for whom Whitie had been a former assistant. Some cynics questioned the regularity with which McDonald’s former assistants won city-sponsored designs. The Mitchell is now a category B listed building. The dome was a latter addition to the building and the figure on top was designed by Thomas Clapperton and is called Literature. One good consequence of the building of the M8 motorway at Charing Cross was that it gave an unobstructed view of the Mitchell and its dome. Every cloud… 
It is said that after the Mitchell, Whitie did little of significance for the rest of his life. Clapperton, on the other hand, is probably most famous for his statue of Robert the Bruce which he created in 1929 and which stands at the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, looking as if it had been there for hundreds of years. Another statue of Clapperton’s which is well known and stands in Glasgow Green is of Springtime, or Peter Pan, which he designed in 1949. The man who lost out to Whitie, John Arthur, had worked for the company of James Burnet who designed Charing Cross Mansions with Arthur as his assistant. Arthur also designed a building I have staggered out of a few times, the University of Glasgow Students Union, built between 1929 and 1931 at University Avenue just before the junction of Bank Street and Gibson Street. The few times I was in there drinking I was with medical students and, knowing them as I did then, I would not want any of them to examine me, never mind operate.

Stewart Memorial Fountain, Kelvingrove

The majority of the Mitchell’s books are stored in the extension which was built between 1972 and 1980 and which connects the Library to the Theatre on Granville Street. The theatre was designed by James Sellers. Sellers was born in the Gorbals and articled to the architects H & D Barclay at the age of 13. Anyone who has walked through Kelvingrove Park knows his work and has, perhaps, splashed in it, either as a child or after a few pints on a hot day. It is the large fountain in the park which is a memorial to former Glasgow Lord Provost James Stewart. Sellers' work is dotted around Glasgow. He designed St Luke’s Greek Orthodox Church at Dundonald Road, just off Great Western Road at Gartnavel and which can be seen from the boating pond there. He also designed the nearby Kelvinside Academy, among whose former pupils was Sir Hugh Fraser, head of the Fraser department stores, which were founded in 1849 and whose main building at the corner of Argyle Street and Buchanan street Sellers designed in 1883. Sellers designed the Anderson College of Medicine on Dumbarton Road at Partick which was in the process of construction when he died. He had been visiting the Glasgow International Exhibition which he had also helped design when a nail pierced his boot. He was so busy at the time that he neglected the injury. Later, he died of blood poisoning. He was only forty-five years old. The Anderson College of Medicine has an unfinished look to it despite to project being taken over by a colleague when he died.

Anderson College of Medicine

I think Sellers deserves more recognition, not only because I like his work, which is better than a great many contemporaries of his, but because he wasn’t interested in awards or accolades - much like Albert Marquet. He declined a knighthood in 1879 and preferred not to become a Fellow of the RIBA, for which he was proposed by J.J. Burnet, the father of John Burnet who designed Charing Cross Mansions. Some say both rejections on his part were in deference to his senior partner Campbell Douglas but I have my own unfounded suspicions. Sellers came from a relatively poor background in the Gorbals, his father being a house factor, which is an old Scottish term for an estate agent of sorts. In effect, it meant his father looked after property and made sure it was maintained. Lindsay Miller wrote of Sellers on his death in 1888 that he only went abroad twice; ‘When young he had not the means, when able not the time.’ Sellers was also secretary of the Architectural Section of the Glasgow Philosophical Society and, along with John Honeyman, took a strong interest in the housing of the working classes and the poor. It was probably due to this interest that he was commissioned to design several welfare buildings. Incidentally, Sellers also designed the Carnegie Baths at Schoolend Street in Dunfermline in 1884 which are still standing and still in use although modified. While I’m mentioning incidental and coincidental elements… I mentioned John Honeyman the architect a moment ago. He was a notable Glasgow architect responsible for many of Glasgow’s great buildings. A member of his family has already been mentioned in this blog, his grandson Thomas John Honeyman, the man who convinced Salvador Dali to sell his Christ of St. John to Glasgow.

Not much is left of the Mitchell Theatre as Sellers designed it other than the elegant façade (which, as of June 2022 has just had extensive reinforcement work completed due to subsidence. Glasgow has a great many old mines beneath its surface and the whereabouts of some of them are unknown until the buildings above begin to sink.). It was originally called St. Andrew’s Halls and during its glory days in the 1880s and 90s it was considered Scotland’s preeminent venue for concerts and meetings, with a grand hall which could hold 4,500 people, two lesser halls, a number of small halls and a grand ballroom. But the main building was gutted by fire in 1962 and the rebuilding was primarily designed to house the ever-growing collection of volumes for the library. The hall of the theatre now seats only 418 people.

Mitchell Theatre, formerly St. Andrew's Halls

I mentioned that the Mitchell has 1,213,000 volumes. That is an inconceivable amount. The Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt was considered one of the largest and most significant libraries in ancient times. At that time, the works would have been papyrus scrolls. Estimates as to the number of scrolls vary between 40,000 and 400,000 - the equivalent of 100,000 books. The Imperial Library of Constantinople was said to have over 100,000 volumes of ancient texts. The Library of Pergamum had approximately 200,000 volumes. Of course, the worth of a library doesn’t depend on the number of the books in its possession but on the quality of their content.

Speaking of quality, there is something I’ve often wondered. How much of the ancient literature we have is of the best? Someone has gone to the trouble of calculating how much of ancient Greek literature is still extant, that is literature as opposed to just something written and excluding Christian works and technical works. Given that much of what we have is of fragmentary portions, the number was given in the amount of words and that was 16 million words. Sixteen million words would equate to 160 books of a length of around 100,000 words. Latin literature is more difficult to calculate. Much of it would have been translations of the ancient Greek, and Latin was used as the language of scholars up until the 18^th century. If we stick to Roman literature, eliminating translations from ancient Greek and later Christian works, the academics are still in disagreement. Let’s suppose that it is twice or three times as much as ancient Greece. We would have around 480 books. For safety’s sake, let’s double it to 1,000. So, including ancient Greek and Roman literature that’s around 1,160 books. A person might easily read that number. In a period of twenty years that would amount to only 58 books a year - just over one a week. But I mentioned a moment ago quality as opposed to quantity. How much of what has been preserved is the best? The renaissance scholar Pietro Bembo, who died in 1547, estimated that only 1% of ancient literature survives. Given that his figures are almost 500 years old, recent scholars tried to come up with a more accurate assessment. For their purposes they defined ancient literature as, specifically, literature that is pre-2^nd century A.D. It was a difficult task, there was much debate and argument, and they presented numerous qualification and caveats as to how the estimates might be measured, such as the fact that of 2000 Greek authors known by name the complete works of only 136 are preserved, while we have only fragments of another 127. But this also causes a difficulty because, taking Euripides as an example, there were two lesser Attic poets of this name than the famous one, so to go by named authors alone is misleading. What about subtracting the works we know to exit from works we know of by title alone? No, because the ancient sources of titles disagree. One source names twenty works by the same author while another lists five...

You get the point.

The answer then, varies between 0.4% and 2%. Is it likely that if we were to pull out, solely by the dictates of chance, between 0.4% or 2% of the contents of the Mitchell, we would have the best? I like to gamble now and again but I wouldn’t gamble on that.

For scholars of ancient texts there is hope, and frustration. Since the 1880s more papyri are dug out of the earth each year than are published. There are said to be 1 to 1.5 million as yet unpublished papyri, of which it is estimated 10,000 will be ‘new’ works. What gems lie in store! I can’t wait… and I don’t think I will.

I imagine that many of the ancient texts of these libraries which survived the centuries have made their way into the Mitchell in translation and probably also in ancient Greek and Latin or whatever their original language might have been. So... the Mitchell is well stocked, in quality as well as quantity.