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| 'Now where did I leave ma fags?' |
To get back to the Mitchell’s phenomenal
number of 1,213,000. That’s nothing compared to the British library which has
an estimated 170-200 million items, not all in English. As a legal deposit
library, it receives copies of all books published in the United Kingdom, which
amounts to approximately 8,000 each day. Each year 9.6km of new shelf space is
required. Compared to that, the Mitchell seems modest in comparison. I once had
a first edition of the collected essays of Thomas De Quincy which I bought
from Voltaire & Rousseau at what was for me, then, the expensive amount of
£7.50. In one of the essays, De Quincy notes that during an idle moment it
occurred to him to calculate how many books he might be able to read in a
life-time. The answer, he says, plunged him into a profound melancholy. If he
did nothing else but read, he calculated, he would still only be able to get
through a miniscule portion of the great works which he knew to be available.
It pained him to consider the great volumes which would be left unread at his
death. I wonder how many of the 200 million items in the British Library are worth
reading? Incidentally, I don’t have the De Quincey book anymore. My brother was ‘tidying up’
and threw it out – it was old, he reasoned, and probably not worth keeping. I
later discovered it was worth at least £500.
I
wonder if De Quincey ever read Sir Thomas Browne. Browne, writing in 1643,
complained of their being too many books in the world. In his Religio medici, he wrote:
‘I have heard some with deep sighs
lament the lost lines of Cicero;
others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the Library of Alexandria; for my own part, I think
there be too many [books] in the World… ‘Tis not a melancholy Ultinam of my own, but the desire of
better heads, that there were a general Synod… for the benefit of learning, to
reduce it as it lay at first, in a few, and solid Authors; and to condemn to
the fire those swarms & millions of Rhapsodies
begotten only… to maintain the trade
and mystery of Typographers.’
What a bonfire Browne might have had
of 200 million books.
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| Sir Thomas Browne |
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| Allo, allo! No! Not that Remy... |
A more recent author, relatively speaking, was
inclined to agree with Browne. Remy de Gourmont was of the opinion that if you
devoted two hours a day to systematic reading you would exhaust the National
Library of France, or its equivalent, in ten years. You would in fact, in that
two hours, multiplied by ten years, have covered all the fields of human
knowledge. How is that possible? Because, he said, the books are so repetitive.
Every author will copy from one another to the point where whole sections of
the universe of published books are useless and entire areas of the continent
formed by this immense library, with its millions and millions of volumes,
collapse when you poke a hole in them with the obstinacy and appetite of an intelligent
worm.
It’s a pity Remy de Gormont came along too late to
tell Thomas De Quincy of his theory. So upsetting did De Quincey find his
calculations that he couldn’t read a word for three weeks, thus lessening the
total amount he might complete in his lifetime.
An old shipmate of
mine believed there could never be too many books and to preserve only the
so-called best would do a great disservice to literature and human learning. He
told me it was the ‘lesser’ volumes he preferred over the ‘classics’ which have
been pondered over, annotated, analysed and explicated by scholars for
centuries. He treasured the obscure authors, the neglected, the forgotten, the
never remembered, the authors chanced upon while browsing in some musty old
bookshop or among the remnants of a bric-a-brac stall. There is a freshness to
them, he said, because of their unknown quality, a vitality, a liveliness that
the canonised authors seem to have lost. They haven’t been ossified as museum
pieces pored over and picked apart by generations of academics and students.
Their story is new. You don’t come to them with any preconceptions. Theirs is
an encounter of unknown opportunity and potential. There are no sign-posts to
prepare the way for you. They are like the old sailors found in out-of-the-way
ports and pubs who look dishevelled, grubby, down on their luck, maybe even a
little senile. Are they talking to you in the hope of a free drink? You wonder,
ashamedly, if their conversation is worthwhile, and then... they beguile you
with a story that haunts your dreams – day and night dreams – and remains with
you as long as your memory persists.
For a period of around a year in the
mid-90s I was in the habit of visiting the Mitchell on an almost daily basis. At
that time, they had the only copies I could get my hands on of Louis Ferdinand
Céline and Blaise Cendrars whose books were mostly out-of-print. It wasn’t
until the late-90s that Céline’s books began to be reprinted by the Dalkey
Archive press. Despite the fact that even his detractors agreed he was a great
writer, Céline had committed the near fatal mistake – literally – of siding with the
Vichy government during the German occupation of France and writing three
anti-Semitic pamphlets. After the war he fled North with Marshall Petain until
he found himself in Denmark. Back in France, he was tried in his absence and
sentenced to death. He spent several years in and out of Danish prison and
finally returned to France after his sentence was commuted and he was allowed
his freedom due to the prison time he had spent in exile. His books were out of
fashion and some people believed he should never be published again, which is
very short-sighted. Some of the greatest writers in the history of literature
have had very questionable attitudes on any number of subjects. Because an artist
does not meet the moral criteria of one age, or place, or people, does not
diminish the quality of their work. If Savonarola had his way most of the great
works of the early Renaissance would have been consigned to the flames in his
bonfire of the vanities.
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| Louis Ferdinand Céline |
Cendrars
is a writer who is not very well known to English speaking readers. He was born
in Switzerland and wrote in French, living much of his adult life in France
when he wasn’t travelling. His mother was Scottish and all of the translated
books of his in the Mitchell library bare a stamp from the Swiss embassy noting
that they were gifted to the library as a token of Swiss-Scottish cordiality
due to his Cendrars' mother’s nationality.
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| Blaise McCendrars |
When
you visit a library on a regular basis you discover something which I have
found to be true in every library I have ever frequented – libraries attract
oddballs of every description. You have readers for purpose and readers for
pleasure, the curious, the idle, those dedicated to one subject or genre, the
dilatants - among whose number I include myself, the casual, the careless, the
careful, the confused, happiness hunters, truth hunters and mystery hunters.
And then… there are the others, who might ungenerously be called, the nutters.
The last time I was in the Mitchell I saw an Indian man who, by his appearance,
looked to be a down-and-out who had gone into the Library to keep warm – it was
a wet afternoon in late November. Before him he had a pile of books open as
though he was in the process of researching and cross-referencing something
important to him. To one side, he had small squares of paper which he was writing on in a minute handwriting – taking notes, apparently. I was curious. I passed
by slowly, wondering what books he was studying. I was surprised to notice that the books had nothing in common with one another. They appeared to have
been picked up at random. The paper
he was using for his notes was the cardboard of cereal packets which he had
roughly torn into small rectangles. As for his notes, he was scribbling small
lines with a blue ball-point pen over and over again until the grey of the
cardboard was completely covered in blue ink and then he would exchange it for
another card. What was going on? It was as if, by his actions, he was mimicking
someone studying without quite understanding what they were doing. Had he been a
scholar who had lost his mind and was now going through the motions out of some
dim recollection of what he had previously done? I once knew of an orchestra
conductor who had suffered severe brain damage when a slate flew off of a roof
in a strong wind and embedded itself in his head. He would wander the streets
muttering to himself and whenever he passed a tree with birds twittering and
whistling, he would stop and ‘conduct’ them as though compelled through some
instinct of his former life. Perhaps the destitute scholar was in a similar
situation. He certainly approached his task with absolute dedication and
seriousness of purpose. When I left a couple of hours later, he was still
there, still scribbling away, the rectangles of cardboard piling up by his
side. In London, I was in the habit of visiting a library in Crouch End. I had
been in the library two days when I discovered the most obvious resident. He
was relatively young, around thirty years old, dishevelled and, for the
duration of my time there, wearing the same clothes every day. Perhaps he slept
in them. He would walk up to the desk, repeat the same phrase to whoever was
there, then make a tour of the library. His route followed the same path every
day without deviation. He wold stop at the same sections, pick out the same
books, flick through them in the same manner for approximately the same amount
of time, replace them, then continue on his way. When his circuit was complete,
he would sit in a red-leather armchair in an out-of-the-way corner of the
library for fifteen minutes before leaving. On my fifth day there, my
imp-of-the-perverse got the better of me. I sat in the red chair. His red chair. He followed
his usual routine until it came to the moment when he sat in the chair. He
turned the corner of a bookshelf which had hidden me from his sight, saw me in
the chair and froze. I wondered if he’d ever come across anybody sitting in the
chair before. He stood staring at me as though he had no idea how to process
this information. Finally, he stepped back behind the bookshelves. Every thirty
seconds his head would pop out to see if I was still there. After fifteen
minutes the cruelty of what I was doing occurred to me. I was mocking the
afflicted. I stood up and left. He stepped forward towards the empty chair,
stopped, watched me for a moment as if to make sure I wasn’t playing some trick
on him, then… he sat. And that was all he ever did on the chair – sit. There
were many other empty chairs around but that seemed to be his chair. Why? Who knows?
What
will the nutters and oddballs do if the libraries should ever close down? But I
don’t think they will. I have nothing against e-readers. I have three of them
which I take with me whenever I travel. But there is a tactile, sensual
experience in books. As well as the feel on the book in your hand, there is the
smell of old books. The distinctive smell of old books is lignin which is
present in all wood-based paper. It is closely related to vanilla and the smell
is released as the books age and the lignin breaks down. It is for some, mouth watering. Old libraries and
bookshops are suffused with the scent, but sometimes it is hard to detect if the books were formerly owned by smokers or were kept in a room with a coal
fire. Then the books have the scent of old tobacco, which can be pleasant or
unpleasant depending on whether the owner was a Capstan A smoker or smoked a pipe full of an exotic blend. The books kept in rooms with open fires also hold their
smoky-scent which may be of plane coal or, if you are lucky, peat. I’ve often
found old books which sat directly on shelving above the fire place and whose covers and spines were so blackened
by smoke and soot that you had to open them to discover what they were.
Books
have many attractions other than the text. All sorts of books are often found on
ships, left behind by previous crew-members who have picked them up in far off
and out of the way ports. Mostly the books are old and tattered and were
probably like that when the previous crewman bought them anyway. The make for a
strange and eclectic library, ranging from garishly-covered paperbacks of
sensational novels to the most beautifully bound copies of old and obsolete
philosophies. What I find peculiarly interesting about them is the little
stamps and stickers that are often found inside the covers, telling of the
various bookshops at various locations where the books were found. The practice
is now obsolete which is a pity. Perhaps applying a small sticker or stamp with
the bookseller’s name and address on the inside cover was an easier thing to do
when bookshops were small independent affairs rather than the big chains they
became. These markings chart the exotic route of a book the way destination
stickers once did on old travel trunks. A book can be followed from Purdy’s in
Charing Cross, to Mitchell’s in Buenos Aires, via Delgado’s in Lisbon. Some of
the books have wandered the oceans for fifty years or more – and were second or
third-hand even then. Some bare the markings of previous owners which are
illegible in the margins, the sea-air having gotten to the old ink. Others, in
pencil, are barely legible as the pages have yellowed and warped for the same
reason. And, of course, there are the little finds between the pages which have
been used as bookmarks – stamps, postcards, bus-tickets, tram-tickets, train-tickets,
flight-tickets and, occasionally, the odd photograph, usually of a woman -
mothers, wives or girlfriends, a reminder of their ties onshore and, perhaps, a
safety line that allows them to roam far and wide. And all of this only hinting
at the lives of the previous readers. We read them and leave them behind for
the next reader.
Which
leads me to a secret I discovered when I was a regular at the Mitchell all
those years ago, a secret which I was surprised to find not all the staff knew
of. In those days, and I imagine it is still the same, you would find the book
you were looking for on the computer, fill in a slip of paper with the details,
take it to the desk and a member of staff would find it for you a few minutes
later. The book I was after was called The Wanderings and Homes of Old
Manuscripts by Montague Rhodes James, better known as M.R. James, the
famous author of ghost stories which the BBC filmed as A Ghost Story for
Christmas in the 60s and 70s. James was an academic and antiquarian and his
normal line of work involved writing scholarly articles and books on such
topics as the Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament, and the book I was
after which was designed to encourage students in the searching and finding of
old manuscripts. The book is brief, a little under sixty pages and I was
returning it to the desk when the man who had brought it up for me asked how I
had liked it. I liked it very much. ‘Interested in old manuscripts?’ he asked.
I wasn’t. I had read James’s ghost stories and I was curious to know what his
academic work was like which was the only reason why I had asked for the book.
But for some reason I didn’t want to tell the old man that. So... I said I was. He asked me if I knew of the Mitchell's collection of old manuscripts. I didn’t. Would I like to see them? Of
course I would. He told me to wait a few minutes.
A
little later, he led me behind the desk and through a glass panelled office to
a side door. Once through the door we were in the main storage area of the
library, but that wasn’t where we were headed. We went up one floor, along a
corridor, turned left and came to a small room. In the room was what looked
like a cupboard door. It was locked and the old man had the key. I was
surprised when he opened the door and showed me the collection. It wasn’t what
I expected. I had expected a large room with walls lined with shelves and
manuscripts. But there was only one bookcase and it contained the entire collection
of manuscripts which numbered around 136. The cupboard was temperature and humidity controlled. He took one or two volumes out, seemingly at
random, and placed them on a nearby desk for me to look through. He told me the
one I had before me was known as the Gigas, or Devil’s Bible, originally
from Prague and of which only one other was known and was in the National
Library of Sweden. It was large and heavy and had been made in the 13th
century in what was then Bohemia. The old librarian pointed out to me some
significant marks on the manuscripts which helped determine where the books had
originally come from, who owned them, and, occasionally, who made them. He also
told me that anyone researching old manuscripts should not only be on the
look-out for what is there but also for what is not there – that is,
signs of erasure, especially on the margins of the first leaf and on the
fly-leaves at either end. Here, the owner’s name was usually written. But
often, the owner’s name was accompanied by a curse on the wrongful possessor
and, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, there were many wrongful
possessors. Whether the curse troubled them or whether they wanted to sell the
book on and did not want to upset possible buyers, it was often attempted to
remove the curse and the name. But vellum is a difficult surface to remove all trace
of previous markings from. What was once there can be recovered by dabbing the
area with ammonium bisulphide which does not stain the page. Dabbed on the
surface with a soft paintbrush and dried off at once with blotting paper, it
makes the old markings leap to light with astonishing clarity, sometimes
slowly, so that the letters cannot be read until the next day. It is, though, of
no use to apply it to writing that was red… and its smell is overpowering,
overpowering but the elixir of palaeographers. Some manuscripts though, the old man sighed,
preserve an obstinate silence. They have been rebound and have lost their
fly-leaves in the process, or, worse than that, their first and last quires
have dropped away. In such cases only those with great experience may be able
to tell the date and country of origin. He showed me another manuscript which
he said was in Anglo-Saxon and was on the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the
Anthropophagi which no longer existed in Latin. Another which no longer existed in Latin was a poem on the adventures of
St. Thomas in India. The Mitchell, he said, was fortunate enough to have The Book of Jannes and Jambres
and a Book of Enoch in Latin, another rarity, he assured me. Another was
the curiously titled Red Book of Eye which was a copy of the Gospels
which St. Felix of Burgundy brought with him to Britain in the seventh century.
It’s curious title, he explained, was due its being kept at the priory at Eye at
Suffolk.
It
was a month or two later that I asked one of the librarians if I might see the
old manuscripts again. Given how casually the old librarian had shown me the
collection I assumed it was open to the public on request. But the librarian I
asked had never heard of the manuscript collection. He called over another
librarian and she had never heard of it either. The old librarian was on
holiday at that stage and couldn’t be asked. A week later I was in Rotterdam. I
have never seen the manuscript room since and I expect the librarian, old as he
was, is, more than likely, dead by now. If you are curios enough to look at it, I was taken to it from the 4th floor so it must be on the floor above, not the main floor of the library but the floor of the interior which means, I imagine, it is somewhere between the official 4th and 5th floors.
Speaking of libraries, a few years
ago I saw the greatest library I have ever come across, not in terms of number
of volumes but in terms of dedication to the cause of libraries. I had
found myself wandering through Central and South America, meeting many odd characters
along the way but one of the most remarkable we met was an old Englishman who
lived in an isolated and undeveloped portion of north-western Brazil, on the
border with Honduras, and who scraped out a living from the remnants of a
former gold-mine. The nearest village, which was little more than a few huts
around a trading post, was thirty long miles away. The man had lived at this
isolated outpost for over 30 years and had never used the internet or a
mobile phone. The only concession to the modern world he had in his home was an
old radio which picked up, infrequently and irregularly, a bizarre range of
signals from all over the world. In fact, he would often receive a clearer signal
from somewhere in Europe that he would from Rio or Santos or anywhere else in
South America.
He lived in the remnants of the mine’s
headquarters, a two-storied building which had held the manager’s home on the
top floor while the ground floor contained a storeroom, kitchen, office and an
all-purpose area where the miners would meet, eat, drink and socialise. It was
a spacious building but too large for the man who only occupied two rooms on
the ground floor, one of which was the kitchen. His power came from a generator
and his only contact with other humans was his once-every-six-weeks trip to the
trading store for fuel and supplies.
It was in one of the ‘spare’ rooms
of his home that we made our magical discovery. In the former social room of
the miners the man had built a library. It was, we discovered, a library of the
imagination. He had constructed a series of bookshelves around the walls and had
filled the shelves with books of his own making – cardboard facsimiles of real
books. The titles of the books and the authors’ names had been carefully
painted on the decorated spines to resemble leather with gilt lettering. His library was
subdivided into sections and the two largest sections were labelled African
Exploration – which contained works by and about Sir Richard Burton, Mungo
Park, Livingston, General Gordon, Stanley, Speke and many others – and South
American Exploration – with books on and by Colonel Fawcett, Bernal Diaz,
Prescott, Van Hagen, etc. The other sections were suitable arranged: Botany of…
Geology of… Mineral distribution of… He had books on undersea exploration, on
cosmology, astronomy and astrology, art, literature, history, philosophy,
theology, alchemy, magic, and numerous anthropological studies. Not all of the books
were of the imaginative variety. Some had materialised. Every time he obtained
a tangible copy of a book, he would replace the painted copy on his shelves.
The beginning of his collection had come from a complete volume of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica of the 1950s he had discovered in the former manager’s old rooms.
Over many nights he had flicked through it, noting down the names of
interesting volumes mentioned, hoping one day to read them. Other titles and
authors he had discovered in various magazines and newspapers which had come
into his hands over the years from God-knows where. What a wonderful thing it
would be, he had thought, to sit surrounded by his volumes, always able to
reach out and lift something of interest. And he had built his library.
The man’s main pastime after a day
of scraping for gold was to sit in his library, flicking through his
Britannica, surrounded by all the book, or rather, the titles, he one day hoped
to read. He seemed content with his life and said he did not miss human
companionship.
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