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.

There is a passage in Richard de Bury, of Durham's, medieval treatise on the love o books which Catholic publishers might display in order to put the Catholic public on its metal. He is discussing all the ways in which grimy clerics can injure books, sticking straw to mark the places, and spilling things between the pages, and cutting off the margins to write letters and he goes on from them to crying children, who must never be allowed to admire the pretty capital letters, because they instinctively want to touch whatever they see.

And from the crying children he descends lower still, and says 'moreover, the laity, who look at a book turned upside down just as if it were open in the right way, are utterly unworthy of any communion with books. Let the clerk take care also that the scullion reeking from his stew pots does not touch the lily leaves of books all unwashed, but he who walketh without blemish shall minister to the precious volumes.

I am grateful to him for that 'also', marking a certain transition in his mind; and it is only fair to add that his next sentence reads: 'And again, the cleanliness of decent hands would be o great benefit to books as well as scholars, if it were not that the itch and pimples are characteristic of the clergy.'

He was, in short, an exacting and fussy bishop, whose motto was 'Do not Touch', and his temper was not sweetened by the knowledge that unlettered hands spoke uncharitably about his great collection of books, and though he said mind their vituperation no more than the barking of dogs, he spent pages answering them that library building was a good work, as it assuredly was in the fourteenth century. He was, indeed a generous lender, who knew that books exist to be read, and not least when they are all rare and valuable.

Taken from Woodruff at Random edited by Mary Craig

Fortunately the Library does not take have such a policy but we do require members to handle our books with the greatest care because they are rare and valuable.

Religious Writing

When I read in libraries in my youth I was always impressed by the number of diligent religious who made immense historical compilations, like careful lists in many volumes of all the men who were bishops anywhere over several centuries, and so on. Only now in my more experienced years do I begin to understand how and why this happened.

These works were protective walls, ramparts which cagey religious erected so that they could never be asked by priors and superiors to do anything unappetising. 'I have my work', they would say. And soon all the younger monks would accept it as a tradition that Dom Scholasticus must never be asked to do anything, because he was engaged on the next volume of the majestic compilation that would bring so much honour to the abbey. There is nothing like a magnum opus as an abiding pretext for doing nothing else.

From Woodruff at Random edited by Mary Craig