Libraries in history.

The modern library has evolved as a building type over half a millennium and is, as usual, facing rapid and irrevocable change. Yet some elements have persisted since the origins of the separate book storage space.

Any purpose-built library serves a symbolic as well as a practical purpose: by dedicating a special space to books and reading we signal the value we place on learning and culture, whatever use we subsequently make of it. Individuals as well as institutions can, of course, build libraries for themselves, and the idea of a separate library room was actually unusually well established ill the English house between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (see Girouard, Thornton). Over this period it underwent considerable changes in planning and use: early examples were relatively small fitted book-closets or studies, used largely as private masculine retreats, while by the nineteenth century they had become larger, more comfortably furnished family rooms, still perhaps seen primarily as 'a sort of Morning-room for gentlemen',(1) but now also accessible to the ladies of the household. But while some private collections were housed in conditions of considerable splendour, it is the history of institutional examples which really concerns us here. It was from their struggle to reconcile the needs of growing numbers of books, staff and a separate category of readers that the library, as a distinct building type, emerged most fully.

The origins of the modern institutional library can be traced back to the late Middle Ages. Specialized and indeed elaborate purpose-built libraries had existed in ancient Greece and Rome, attached to palaces, temples and municipal buildings. Some had contained lens or even hundreds of thousands of volumes, but these collections were all dispersed and destroyed during the fall of the Roman empire in the third and fourth centuries AD. While monasteries acted as centres of learning during the early Middle Ages, producing as well as preserving books, their collections of books were numbered in hundreds, rather than thousands. These could be kept in cupboards, or perhaps a small vaulted room, usually next to the cloisters, and dispensed to members of the community as required. Carrels or alcoves for reading and writing might be situated nearby.

The fully equipped library room only appeared in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in response to the widening of the religious orders' teaching duties, and in particular to the foundation of universities. Now greatly enlarged numbers of readers, not all of them necessarily trustworthy, required ready access to growing numbers of reference books. The answer was to provide a long, narrow room, preferably set at first-floor level to increase security and reduce the risk of damp, and lit by rows of windows. Between these were set long lecterns to which the books were kept chained. The detached building provided at the Sorbonne (founded 1954) by the end of the thirteenth century was an influential early example of such a library. The model proved a durable one; when numbers of books began to expand, especially after the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, it was relatively simple to provide extra storage space on shelves above or below the lecterns. By the late sixteenth century at Oxford and Cambridge, lecterns had become stalls, equipped with seats. This arrangement, reminiscent of the earlier carrel, had the advantage of giving readers some privacy and protection from draughts.

The wall-system

The next stage was the wall-system, apparently pioneered by Juan de Herrera at the Escorial in about 1567. As the name suggests, this involved moving the bookcases against the walls; by using ladders or (more safely) galleries it now became possible to utilize the whole height of a room. The wall-system provided useful extra shelf-space for growing numbers of books, but it was also valued because it gave scope for greater architectural grandeur. With the advent of the Renaissance, building a library had become a way for the princely collector, as well as the university or college, to demonstrate commitment to humanistic values and the spread of learning. Though not public in the modern sense, such libraries were usually open to the serious scholar at least; more elaborately decorated than earlier examples, they often also served as galleries for the display of works of art and curiosities. The earliest use of wall-cases in an English library was at the Bodleian in 1610-13, when a new Arts End was added to Duke Humfrey's library. Security was maintained by keeping books on the lowest shelves chained, and those above behind a grille, while the galleries were only accessible to staff. A further extension, the Selden End, was added in 1634-36. However, the most monumental of seventeenth-century English libraries was undoubtedly that built by Wren for Trinity College, Cambridge,