Libraries, Books, and Collectors of Texts, 1600-1900

Annika Bautz, James Gregory, Annika Bautz, James Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429952395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book presents the collectors' roles as prominently as the collections of books and texts which they assembled. Contributors explore the activities and networks shaping a range of continental and transcontinental European public and private collections during the Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern eras. They study the impact of class, geographical location and specific cultural contexts on the gathering and use of printed and handwritten texts and other printed artefacts. The volume explores the social dimension of book collecting, and considers how practices of collecting developed during these periods of profound cultural, social and political change.

Part I
Renaissance Collectors

1
Building a Library Without Walls

The Early Years of the Bodleian Library

Robyn Adams and Louisiane Ferlier

Bodley’s Refoundation of the Library at Oxford

In this chapter, we examine the early records of the Bodleian Library in order to explore the protean administrative processes employed by Sir Thomas Bodley and Thomas James, his first librarian. These early records yield a glimpse of how various aspects of the library were shaped and of the attitudes towards books and donors demonstrated by Bodley and James. Our research data extracted from these records reveal bibliographical patterns and physical behaviours which allow us to interrogate the intellectual processes at work in populating the library shelves. Erected, famously, ‘for the publique use of students’, we aim to interrogate the tension of the Bodleian’s role as a public institution promoting and preserving for posterity the muniments of early English religion while at the same time serving an academic community, the principal constituency of which were students. We aim to confront to material evidence this idea of the library for the ‘publique use of students’ and dig deeper to find other sources of motivation for the resurrection of the bibliographical monument that was Bodley’s vision.

Following his withdrawal from public service in his political role as diplomatic agent in the Netherlands during the conflict with Spain between 1588 and 1596, Bodley directed elsewhere the administrative energy that had defined his career as a legate.¹ His decision to return to Oxford, to refurbish the structure and furnish his newly constructed presses with books resulted in not only soliciting philanthropic gestures from politically powerful friends and contacts but also a new sort of activity: that of organising a brand-new kind of institution. In the early months following his proposal to Convocation to take on the task of refurbishing the library, Bodley found himself dealing with a range of novel organisational demands, including setting up the financial endowment for the running costs of the library building, the staff, and the accessions; the opening hours; and the members of the University of Oxford who would be permitted access to his ‘publique library’. In his notes for library government, Bodley summarised under headings the following:

The forme of y^e general othe, y^at is to be taken by all, aswel strangers, as graduats, that ought to be admitted, to studie in the Librarie.²

The library admission guidelines set down by Bodley limiting access to doctors and masters were relaxed in 1613 to include bachelors of arts and other undergraduates, although foreign readers and sons of members of the House of Lords could read in the library prior to this date (Philip 34; Wheeler 1928, 12). After appointing Thomas James as librarian, Bodley could have delegated some of the quotidian details of library management, but it seems from their correspondence that Bodley was keen to participate in epistolary discussion of the smallest detail. This may be because for the first few years of the refurbishment, between 1598 and the opening of the library in 1602, he was mostly resident in London, attending to his concerns there, arranging the purchase of books through the London booksellers, soliciting donations of books and money to fund these purchases, and setting up the solid finances for the library (Clennell). As a consequence, his letters to James (only one side of the correspondence is extant; see Wheeler 1926) are scrupulous and extensive in describing Bodley’s particular requirements about the development of theoretical practices to which early modern libraries were now turning their attention.

‘Building a Library Without Walls’: A Library for Public Service

In the historical scholarship of the Bodleian as an institution, the meticulous observation to detail and generosity of Bodley has been thoroughly and affectionately covered. Attention has recently focused on the pro-grammatic method of Bodley, Thomas James, and the Bodleian’s seventeenth-century librarians, and the institution of systems of acquisition, cataloguing, and access to the library (Clement; Poole). Bodley’s own Protestant background is well documented (Clennell). Thomas James’s extreme Protestant views were a key contributing factor in seeking the job of librarian, where he anticipated unlimited access to books and manuscripts which would assist him in his main objective: to marshal the library’s resources to pursue the theological and ecclesiological justification of English Protestantism. Specifically, James considered the English manuscript tradition as holding the key to getting as close as possible to the purity of church doctrine through English exegesis of the church fathers. As Paul Nelles notes, ‘Put plainly, because born of a pure church English manuscripts provided a more faithful record of the history of the church than any to be found on the continent’ (Nelles 27). The early collections of the Bodleian offered the ideal place to undertake this research, yet while Bodley endorsed the energetic harnessing of the library collections in proving the superiority of the Anglican Church tradition, he ensured that in the first few months following his appointment, James’s time was heavily occupied with administrative matters.

At source, Bodley’s plan for the library was to build a place of knowledge which would benefit public service through the provision of access to material in the areas of theology, law, medicine, and arts. His intention upon retiring from diplomatic service was to

set up my Staffe at the Library doore in Oxford; being thoroughly perswaded, that … I could not busy my selfe to better purpose, then by reducing that place (which then part lay ruined and wast) to the publique use of students.

(Clennell 2006, 52)³

He implies in this well-rehearsed passage that the library is not only a public institution in the sense that the academic community can access it but also principally that that access facilitates and promulgates public service. Elizabeth Leedham-Green and David McKitterick have posited that his construction was ‘de facto the British national library’ (Leedham-Green and David McKitterick 336).

Bodley’s noble commitment was offset by the fact that the donations were unpredictable. His call to philanthropic arms resulted in a relative deluge of donations in the first decade of books, manuscripts, money, and miscellaneous items, including a stuffed crocodile and an armillary sphere.⁴ As an accession plan, this was financially resourceful, but fundamentally unreliable. Neither Bodley, James, nor Convocation drafted a specific list of books required for and by the readers of the library. In order to create their grand vision, Bodley and James used the cash donations from benefactors to populate the shelves with books they knew to be absent from the body of donated books, tasking London booksellers to source books from abroad (Philip 13). This suggests that Bodley and James had a conceptual idea of what the library should contain. In his correspondence, we find Bodley discussing with James the necessary books to include.⁵ The choices are not discussed in relation to the university curriculum but in terms of interest, curiosity, and good service, in keeping with Bodley’s personal programme to refurbish the library as a bulwark of the Protestant faith in England.

This shaping of the collection by Bodley and James is visible at the book level by scrutinising the acquisitions enumerated in the library catalogue. But one can also sense this active shaping by observing Bodley and James’s policy of re-binding of various titles together (these groupings are known as Sammelbände) and thus assembling a new reading experience.⁶ In a similar way, their method and intention for the library can be revealed by granular analysis of the gifts of various donors on the pages of the Benefactors’ Register and in the marks of provenance inscribed by the librarians directly on the title pages.

This historic moment of philanthropy, acquisition, organisation, and cataloguing—much of it precisely documented in the Bodleian’s archives—provides an ideal research topic for the staff at the research laboratory of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London.⁷ The archival residue which comprises the activity of Bodley and his librarians offers a significant body of data and metadata with which we have begun to piece together the granular changes and shifts in architecture, biblio-geography,⁸ and bibliographical representation at work in the early years of the seventeenth century. This project matched the key criterion of Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL hereafter) projects: asking a question of archives, in this case ‘what can the early records tell us about the process of assimilating donations into the library?’ and marrying this question to a series of digital techniques for information management and retrieval. In 2012, we began developing a project to explore in minute detail the systems of library administration instigated by the Bodleian’s own archives to examine how Bodley and James processed and allocated the donations in the library in the first 20 years following refurbishment. We wanted to see if we could plot these movements of books around the library in the early years, and—through scrutiny of the archives—to get a sense of the program-matic changes made by Bodley and his librarians in situating the books and formalising the geography of the library. Furthermore, by sampling data from the donations listed in the Benefactor’s Register and associated early records, and by examining the provenance of these books, it has been possible to determine to some extent the prehistory and afterlife of books given by ‘private’ benefactors to a ‘public’ institution.⁹

Combined with previous valuable scholarship on the Bodleian’s collections and library administration, our granular analysis of the sample yields information relating to the early systems and processes adopted and developed by Bodley and James, and their attitudes to the books. In capturing a range of information extracted from both the archives and sampled books in a relational database, we have been able to assemble a partial view of the library as it appeared between 1605 when the first printed catalogue was published and the printed catalogue of 1620.¹⁰ Data is pulled from the records from the Bodleian’s own manuscript archive named ‘Library Records’.¹¹ This includes the name of each donor and any supplied biographical information, the contemporary bibliographical description, and the historic shelf mark. Other data is captured from the book itself, including physical provenance markers such as binding, inscription, and annotation and bibliographical metadata such as format, issue, and date of publication.¹² By collating this data, it is possible to navigate a section of the library’s collection through several different points of entry. For example, inspection of the shelf marks, in particular where they change after 1605, offers a view of how Bodley or James reclassified books, moving position or even shifting between faculties. Or, by scrutinizing the collection of an individual donor and calling up the individual books, the researcher can attempt to ascertain whether their books were retained, quietly de-accessioned, or bound with others coming into the library from different donors or by purchase.

Prototype Finding Aids: Bodley and James’s Catalogues and Lists

Keeping track of the considerable numbers of books (by 1605, books in the library numbered 8,700; see Marr 27), both to record what was already in the library and what remained to be purchased was a formidable task, and occasioned the development of cataloguing and record keeping specific to the Bodleian. From his house in London, Bodley frequently sent James his ‘catalogue’ and ‘alphabet’ and requested return of James’s own; these were both lists and records of books, and those books which had been donated or bought that were duplicate (Wheeler 1926, 12–13). It would seem that for Bodley at this point, ‘catalogue’ was a fairly elastic term of what was meant by an enumerative list of books.

It was the resulting system of organisation which would come to define the Bodleian and its early collections, and which set a precedent for library practice for both public institutions and private libraries for many years to come.¹³ The cataloguing process occupied James for years, as he attempted to assimilate the collections into a coherent system of storage and retrieval. These iterations of proto-catalogues survive in the Bodleian’s archives¹⁴ and track James’s attempts at standardising not only the method of the layout of the shelves but also the method of citation for both internal purposes¹⁵ and for making public institutional finding aids—a difficult task without recourse to formal models and techniques of bibliographical description.¹⁶ Bodley was insistent that he required precise bibliographical description in order to fulfil the annual programme of book buying and ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Renaissance Collectors
• PART II Gentlemen and Their Libraries From the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century
• PART III Beyond Mere Records of Collecting: On Book Catalogues
• PART IV Bibliomania
• Index