The Age reports the State Government has invested $10.4 million towards raising the profile of Melbourne as a home for writers and writing, A third of the funds will be directed towards a new Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas based at the State Library of Victoria, as part of a bid to become only the second UNESCO City of Literature. The remaining funds will be for a program of public events at the Centre. This is in addition to $9 million which the Government has already invested for repairs to the State Library and support of the Melbourne Writer's Festival.

In the same paper, the Entertainment section includes a review of a cabaret-comedy show performed by a Darwin-based librarian. In Librarian Idol Andrew Finegan attempts to challenge the sterotype of librarians as awkward, introverted, myopic and just plain boring. While doubtful as to the success of his performance, Finegan does at least manage to convey the idea that libraries are not just for scholars and students, nor are they mere repositories of knowledge. Rather they are spaces where anyone, especially the homeless and mentally ill, can find comfort, convervation and above all, a sense of their human dignity.

David Kehoe's editorial in the newsletter contained an important reference to the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Patrimony of the Church's letter Ecclesiastical Libraries and Their Role in the Mission of the Church, which readers can view here.

Pope John Paul II in an address to the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress said, "The patrimony of human thought, cultural achievement and religious truth contained in the world's libraries is not only a monument to past human endeavor; it is the solid ground on which each new generation can strive to build a better future. To ignore this treasure would be for humanity to condemn itself to existing and working in a wasteland. Our own age particularly needs to recover the accumulated wisdom of the past."

Reiterating these words, the President of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Patimony in a letter to Religious wrote, "Libraries not only gather dusty material destined to be forgotten. In them are hidden treasures of Christian experience lived out and communicated through the written word. It is not so much a matter of filling up shelves but of fulfilling the heart while dipping into the wisdom of the fathers and the mothers of the faith - the lymph of a new life - in an itinerary of cultural deepening which is an integral part of the path of individual and communal updating for the growth of the individual and the entire family."

It is for this reason the Library exists: to preserve and propagate the knowledge and wisdom of the Church, and ultimately to proclaim Christ, the Word made Flesh, who is also the Truth.

In the April newsletter:

• David Kehoe considers libraries as a key tool in the Church's mission
• John Young ponders how Jesus can be both God and the Son of God, while distinguishing what it is to be a child of God made in how image and likeness, and a child of God through baptism.
• Jude Sebastian pays tribute Fr. John Wilkinson CM
• Book Review of Characters in Search of their Author by Ralph McInerny
• Reminder that as tax-time approaches, contributions made to the Library are tax deductible.

Keep reading this blog for further details on Bookmarks, a series of twilight talks by authors associated with the Library, and the Ira Fawcett Childrens Collection.

Of Classes, Divisions and Sections

As a means to introduce readers to the works of the Library we are starting a new series of posts which will feature extracts from books in the collection. These extracts will cover various topics and to provide some continuity, will follow the order of the catalogue. For those unfamiliar with the Library's catalogue it might be helpful to provide a short introduction.

The catalogue follows what is known as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), with some modifications. The DDC is the most widely used classification system in the world and divides information into ten main classes. Each class is further divided into ten divisions, and each division into ten sections. Each section can be further divided to classify ever more specific information. The unique feature of the DDC is that starting with a simple three digit number to represent the ten classes, modifying a single digit allows the divisions and sections to be generated.

For example, the class Religion has been assigned the number 200. By changing the second digit to a '2' we arrive at the division Biblical Studies (220). By again changing the third digit to a '7' we have the section Epistles (227). This section can be further divided by adding '.9' so we have the Catholic Epistles* (227.9) and again by adding a '0.02' we finally arrive at the First Epistle of St. Peter (227.92). One can thus conceive the DDC as a game of addition which could be extended to encompass thousands of individual subjects.

Getting back to the Library's catalogue, one will notice that it specialises in the following classes: Philosophy & Psychology (100), Religion (200), Literature (800) and History (900), which should not come as any surprise. Therefore if you are after books on Social Science (300), Languages (400), Science (500), Technology (600) and the Arts (700) you can most certainly come in to the Library but it might be worth first visiting your local library or the State Library since they will have a greater range of books on these subjects.

News from London

The Library has been informed its counterpart in London, The Catholic National Library, has received a blessing and message of support from Pope Benedict XVI. This coincided with its relocation to St. Michael's Abbey at Farnborough. One of the strengths of the Naional Catholic Library is its Board of Trustees which includes Rev. Dr. Ian Ker, Mr. Piers Paul Read and Lord Nicholas Windsor.

The Secretary of the Board, Mr. Anthony Tyler sent a message to our Library which began:

"It was your group of vulnteers who inspired us to preserve our own library in London in 1997 ... Anyone from the Caroline Chisholm Library in Melbourne, the city in which I was brought up, will receive a warm welcome at the Library here. "

For further information on the Catholic National Library please visit their website at:
www.catholic-library.org.uk

There is abundant evidence that our forefathers were not a whit behind us in their appreciation of good books. It was the ambition of scholars to get hold of anything of real worth in the shape of literature and they took great pains to this end, often making journeys to he extremities of the Continent. Venerable Bede, who was the profoundest scholar of his age in every department whether secular or religious, speaks with enthusiasm of the fine library which he found at Jarrow. This library was due to the exertions of Benedict Biscop, who went as far as Rome in order to procure books for it. Later we come upon the figure of Alfred the Great - a notable figure in any history of literature. He not only set up schools in every part of the kingdom and brought teachers from different places to lecture in them, but he aimed at forming a kind of National Library and he did, in fact, lay the foundations of one.

From The Light of Our Days by Fr. Aloysius Roche and published by Burns, Oates & Washbourne.

Of Angels and Mercy

There is an interesting note on the Guildhall Library by William Kent in his An Encyclopedia of London. It quotes Mr. Bernard Kettle, at one time the Librarian, as saying that Francis Thompson, the poet, used to go constantly to its reading room. "He always came in with two books in his pocket; one, I think, was Sophocles." The poet, however, was in such poor straits and so seedy in appearance "that it fell to my lot to have to perform the painful duty of asking him to forgo his visits ... Had I known that I was entertaining an "angel unawares," I should have perhaps been more reluctant to eject him.

It is worth remembering that [Richard] Whittington founded the library "for the profit of students," and that he was following a normal practice of medieval times. Many have the impression that libraries were monkish things, jealously preserved for clerics only. The lending of books, however, was regarded as a corporal work of mercy, and even the monastic libraries lent them not only willingly, but without charge beyond, in some cases, a deposit on the value of the book, which was repaid on its return. These libraries had quite an up-to-date system, not only in registering borrowings, but also in cataloguing, with an efficient librarian to help and advise students and take care of the books. The present library escaped the severe damage that air raids inflicted on most of the Guildhall buildings, though a great number of the books were lost.

From Catholic London by Douglas Newton and published by Robert Hale.

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.