Books, libraries and free access to both are taken for granted today. However, this has not always been the case. On the occasion of the International Day of Libraries, celebrated annually on 24 October since 1995, I am delving into the history of books and libraries, so, come along and let me take you back in time.
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From cave paintings to bound books
Some of the most ancient cave paintings in the world from Satukunda, India
Cave paintings and oral-storytelling traditions show that humans have always loved stories. Although we often imagine ancient and medieval texts as scrolls or handwritten collections of loose pages, bound books have actually existed since the first century AD. While texts were mostly preserved in rolled-up manuscripts at that time, the so-called codex began to emerge.
The term codex is derived from Latin, meaning a tree trunk or wood split for writing tablets. Later, the meaning evolved to refer to what was inscribed on these tablets, such as a legal document, book, index, and later also a manuscript.
While the first books had wooden covers – those very writing tablets of the original meaning of codex – the second century AD saw the introduction of books with soft covers made from parchment or paper, similar to modern paperbacks.
By the early Middle Ages, we see the first books with wooden covers that were leather-bound. The oldest preserved Western European book of this type is St Cuthbert's Gospel from the 8th century AD, which features wooden boards connected to the leather covers by a clay-like material.
Later medieval book bindings also included staples or were increasingly bound in fabric that was less sensitive to moisture than parchment.
Finding a name 1: When is a book a book?
With the spread of books came a specific name for the object itself. In the Germanic languages, variants of a presumed Germanic root *boks began to appear from the early Middle Ages (8th century) as a term for bound texts, such as Old High German buoh, Old Saxon bok, Middle Dutch boec, Old English boc, Old Norse bok, or Gothic boka. While the singular originally referred to "letter", "rune" or "(lot-designated) rune stick", the plural eventually evolved to encompass meanings such as "written document", "legal document" and "book" for stapled or bound folios of parchment or paper.
From book to library
So, people loved stories, and books already existed, but two obstacles stood in the way of a broader reading public:
- Most people in antiquity and the Middle Ages could not read. Thus, reading aloud or reciting carried great significance, and until the late Middle Ages, this was certainly the most widespread form of consuming books.
- Unlike today, access to libraries and hence to knowledge was limited for the public. If someone wished to know something, they had to ask someone who had access to such knowledge. In antiquity, this applied primarily to great rulers, while in the Middle Ages it was mainly clerics, and later also the lesser nobility or wealthy citizens.
Finding a name 2: When is a library a library?
During the Old English period, the place where books were kept was called boc-hord, book hoard, boc-cest, chest for books or boc-hus, book house. There was even the word biblio-þece, taken from the Greek words for a bookbox, biblion = book, theke = container, box, which still exists in German and the Romance languages in the form of Bibliothek/bibliothèque/biblioteca.
However, when the Normans arrived in the 11th century, they wiped out both the native and the Greek-stem word by using their own native term librarie, designating a library as well as the books within that library or a collection of books. The Norman word itself comes from Latin librarium, plural libraria (itself via librarius = related/belonging to the book from liber = book, originally the inner bark of trees), which was the name for a book-case or chest for books. So, the current English word library is basically the Norman descendant of the original idea shared by Greek, Old English and Latin.
It was literally this bookbox in which the residents of monasteries kept the small number of frequently used books within reach: in the church, in a chapel, in the sacristy, in the scriptorium, or in the refectory for public readings at mealtimes.
As book collections expanded, their accommodation required a dedicated space, which did not start as a specifically designed room just for books. One simply cleared an existing room and refilled it with books. Gradually, a distinct and dedicated space for books emerged, referred to equally as a library and a reading room, before terms began to diverge during the Renaissance, leading to the reading room becoming a part of the larger library.
Back in ancient days, books were stacked on top of each other, not placed side by side.
How did libraries expand their collections?
There were various methods to grow a library's collection:
- Copying within the monastery: this was the standard procedure when the manuscript was available on-site, either within the collection or borrowed from another library. In the case of books that were too valuable for lending, monks also travelled to the library holding the manuscript to copy it there.
- Exchanging duplicates or dispensable items
- Purchase
- Donations and legacies
- Acquisition of books from private ownership: this occurred primarily upon entering or returning to the monastery, be it new novices or monks who have completed their university studies.
- External book production by paid scribes: Today, we have traditionally published authors and self-publishers. In earlier times, these were the monks and literate individuals not belonging to a monastery who produced manuscripts for money, apparently quite successfully: as early as the 14th century, paid scribes sold more books than were written by monks.
Ancient libraries
The first library
The first library is considered to be the collection established in the 7th century BC in Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, of King Ashurbanipal, consisting of an estimated 10,000 clay tablets containing about 1,500 texts in Akkadian cuneiform. These included religious and literary traditions, as well as reports on the palace's finances and government.
Unfortunately, the library was destroyed around 612 BC by the Medes and Babylonians. Around 40,000 fragments were rediscovered in the mid-19th century.
The most important library
An artist's impression of the ancient library of Alexandria
In the third century BC, Ptolemy I founded the most significant library of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, which contained an estimated 700,000 scrolls, bustling with scholars and students, including Euclid, the father of geometry, and Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of the ancient world. In contrast to other Egyptian libraries of the time, which were accessible only to priests and scribes, this library was open to everyone.
The Hellenistic scholar and poet Callimachus developed an efficient library system here with his students. The writings were differentiated between poetry, prose and scholarly works, with authors organised alphabetically. A catalogue of all writings in the library was also created.
This library too was completely destroyed, between the last century BC (Cesar against Pompey) and the second half of the third century AD (emperor Aurelian).
The first private libraries
By this time, there were also the first private libraries belonging to wealthy citizens or philosophical schools, such as Aristotle's library (4th century BC), which, after the conquest of Athens by the Roman ruler Sulla in the last century BC, was brought to Rome as war booty, containing not only Aristotle's writings but also works by other authors.
Already in the second century BC, Romans had plundered the library of the Macedonian ruler Perseus. However, since they were mostly interested in Greek culture and Greek writings, they donated or destroyed, for example, the Phoenician writings of the Carthaginians after the conquest. Thus, even without destruction through wars, further written records were lost for posterity.
The first Roman libraries
As indicated in the aforementioned examples, the first Roman libraries were initially war booty and only later emerged on imperial orders (in peace). The goal was not only the education of the people but also the creation of a symbol of Rome's global power.
Augustus was the first Roman emperor to establish a public library in Rome: in 28 BC, he installed the Bibliotheca Palatina in the Temple of Apollo. Other Roman emperors established libraries in Rome and throughout the Roman Empire, such as Hadrian, who had a library set up in Athens. By the time of Constantine, the first Christian emperor (fourth century AD), there were twenty-eight public libraries available in Rome.
The remains of the Roman library of Celsus in Ephesus
The first libraries with books
With the adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the third and fourth centuries AD, the first book libraries emerged, into which the ancient libraries were gradually integrated. Christian libraries differed from earlier ones by the use of the parchment books – the aforementioned codices – instead of scrolls of papyrus. Many ancient texts were transferred to parchment during the integration, although some were eventually lost.
Libraries in the Middle Ages
1. Monastic libraries
The continuation of library systems and manuscript production was primarily due to the pioneer of monastic libraries, Cassiodorus. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, he founded the Vivarium monastery in southern Italy in the 6th century AD and established, according to the rules in his Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, the collection and copying – and if necessary, translation – of religious and secular manuscripts, such as those from philosophers, rhetoricians and poets, as an explicit duty of the monks.
Benedict of Nursia, the founder of the Benedictine order, also prescribed daily study of texts for the monks of his order’s mother monastery in Monte Cassino.
This transformed the monastery from a mere place of contemplation into a place of education and marked the beginning of the medieval monastic library system, which transmitted the knowledge of antiquity into the later centuries. Early monastic libraries arose in locations such as St Gallen, Bobbio, Lorsch, Cluny, York, and Lindisfarne.
In addition to monastic libraries, four other types of libraries grew or spread in the Middle Ages:
2. Cathedral libraries
Rome served as the medieval equivalent of the Frankfurt Book Fair and was considered a book market throughout the Middle Ages, alongside university towns such as Bologna, with approximately 5,000 books, and Paris. Increasingly, bishoprics, as cultural centres, also possessed cathedral libraries for the education of clergy. The cathedral library in Freising was established in 739 AD. Shortly thereafter, in 802, Charlemagne issued a decree at the Synod of Aachen requiring churches and parishes to acquire a small number of books. For England, it is very hard to gauge the amount of libraries and books, owing to a lack of data before the Norman conquest, although monastic and cathedral book collections show an substantial increase during the late 11th and 12th centuries.
3. City libraries
The governance of cities in the Middle Ages required a certain level of knowledge and the ability to read and write. The necessary books for this were usually kept in the town hall and used by council staff, hence the term council library or city library was coined. Many books were donated to the council library by citizens.
4. University libraries
College libraries are those located within schools where professors and their students lived together, which eventually developed into libraries for individual faculties during the high or late Middle Ages, and further evolved into university libraries. Through the engagement of paid scribes, they grew relatively quickly.
5. Private libraries
With the legal and financial empowerment of the bourgeoisie in the late Middle Ages, the number of private collectors' libraries increased, though they often resembled scholars' libraries rather than purely private collections.
Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s private libraries from the 14th century became public libraries through princely patronage. The Herzog-August-Bibliothek, founded in 1572 in Wolfenbüttel, was one of the most famous princely book collections at the time of Duke Augustus' death in 1666 and arguably the largest library in the world, with about 35,000 volumes containing 135,000 titles reflecting the entirety of medieval and early modern literature. After its reconstruction by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the early 18th century, it became the first independent secular library building in Europe.
More libraries, more books, more problems
Until late in the Middle Ages, many people could not read or read well, yet there were plenty of visitors to medieval libraries. Naturally, these were mainly those who belonged to the community operating the library: clergy, students or wealthy citizens. Additionally, books could be consulted or even borrowed by known or recommended external individuals. Such borrowing was done via messengers, often over long distances. A book of equal value could serve as collateral.
Cataloguing
To keep track of the growing number of books, the following measures were implemented in the Middle Ages to label and catalogue the books:
- Noting the ownership at the beginning or end of the book: for a monastery, this was usually the name of the patron saint, while for private individuals it was name, profession, place of birth and residence, and later also included a coat of arms or, from the end of the 15th century, a corresponding ex libris – a slip of paper pasted into the book or an imprinted stamp with the necessary information.
- Sorting:
- According to value or chronological order, as prescribed by Isidore of Seville, starting with the Bible and related writings, followed by texts of the Church Fathers, contemporary theologians, ancient authors, and finally the writings of the liberal arts.
- According to the still valid principle of the tripartite catalogue, which was already used in St Gallen in the 9th century, namely location, author, and subject catalogue.
- Use of table catalogues: these were termed registrum or index until around 1500 and consisted of written parchment sheets on wood, affixed to the fronts of the book desks listing the books contained therein.
- Use of boxes with loan slips.
Book Theft
While all books were accounted for, their human users were not. Many times, these individuals did not adhere to borrowing prohibitions or return obligations. The example of Emperor Otto II (955-983), who took the finest books from the St Gallen monastery library and never returned them, proves that book theft was not a phenomenon limited to the lower classes – who, after all, neither could read nor had access to libraries. By the 15th century, professional manuscript hunters roamed the lands, taking the best pieces from monastery libraries using letters of recommendation from bishops or popes.
Peculiar Books from the High Middle Ages
A chained book: the chain was used to fix the book to the shelf or desk to prevent theft.
Not least to combat book theft, it was decided in the 13th century to chain books to the desks where they were laid out for easier access. Thus emerged the libri catenati, the chained books of the Middle Ages. The Benedictine monastery in Schaffhausen still possesses around forty chained books in its ministerial library.
There was also a chained-book equivalent for private individuals: today, we have e-books and a search engine on smartphones. Back then, there were the so-called girdle books, in which the world's knowledge was preserved. These books were bound in leather and could be attached to a girdle, allowing the bourgeois population to carry books – primarily religious texts – with them at all times.
Libraries Then and Now
Medieval libraries varied in size from several dozen to two thousand volumes, with two to three hundred volumes considered well-equipped and five to six hundred volumes viewed as very well-stocked.
Typical public libraries in Western countries have media collections in the range of high five-figure numbers, while large libraries boast collections in the single- to double-digit million range. According to https://libguides.ala.org/librarystatistics/largest-public-libs, the New York Public Library, for example, contains over a whopping 25 million ebooks, print, audio and video materials.
With such a wide selection, there is surely something for everyone. So, why not visit your local library again and browse through the analogue and digital offerings?
Further reading
Uwe Jochum: Geschichte der abendländischen Bibliotheken, Darmstadt (WBG) 2018
https://www.dwds.de/wb/Buch
https://www.buecher-wiki.de/index.php/BuecherWiki/Bibliotheksgeschichte
http://www.bibliothek-alexandria.de/sites/altebibliothek.html
https://www.hab.de/bibliothek/
https://www.catawiki.de/stories/4615-eine-vergessene-kunstform-die-geschichte-der-buchbinderei
https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de
https://bibliotheksportal.de/informationen/bibliothekslandschaft/oeffentliche-bibliotheken/
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521792745 (The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland)
https://libguides.ala.org/librarystatistics/largest-public-libs (Top 25 largest public libraries in the US)