On Librarians

Dante Alighieri by an Unknown Master (1530)

From the National Gallery of Washington

The phrase "a lover of learning" can have an edge to it. The many stories of the ignorance of librarians spring from the fact that when a post had to be found for somebody a librarianship was often the most convenient form for the patronage to take. There need be no limit to the number, and the title is an honourable one.

It was such a librarian who disgraced himself by making a great search for the Inferno of Dante and coming back and telling the would-be reader that the work did not exist; that which Dante had written, so far from being anything to do with the inferno, was a Divina Commedia. Quoted by Douglas Woodruff (1897-1978) former editor of The Tablet, historian and journalist.

NB The Inferno is the first of the three books that comprise the Divine Comedy, the others being Purgatorio and Paradiso, and can be readily found under Italian poetry (851's). It is considered a masterpiece comparable to St Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theolgiae or Fra Angelico's paintings.