On Books and The Housing of Them | Page 8

so repulsive applied to the best beloved among inanimate objects.
It may be thought that the gloomy perspective I am now opening exists for great public libraries alone. But public libraries are multiplying fast, and private libraries are aspiring to the public dimensions. It may be hoped that for a long time to come no grave difficulties will arise in regard to private libraries, meant for the ordinary use of that great majority of readers who read only for recreation or for general improvement. But when study, research, authorship, come into view, when the history of thought and of inquiry in each of its branches, or in any considerable number of them, has to be presented, the necessities of the case are terribly widened. Chess is a specialty and a narrow one. But I recollect a statement in the Quarterly Review, years back, that there might be formed a library of twelve hundred volumes upon chess. I think my deceased friend, Mr. Alfred Denison, collected between two and three thousand upon angling. Of living Englishmen perhaps Lord Acton is the most effective and retentive reader; and for his own purposes he has gathered a library of not less, I believe, than 100,000 volumes.
Undoubtedly the idea of book-cemeteries such as I have supposed is very formidable. It should be kept within the limits of the dire necessity which has evoked it from the underworld into the haunts of living men. But it will have to be faced, and faced perhaps oftener than might be supposed. And the artist needed for the constructions it requires will not be so much a librarian as a warehouseman.
But if we are to have cemeteries, they ought to receive as many bodies as possible. The condemned will live ordinarily in pitch darkness, yet so that when wanted, they may be called into the light. Asking myself how this can most effectively be done, I have arrived at the conclusion that nearly two-thirds, or say three-fifths, of the whole cubic contents of a properly constructed apartment[12] may be made a nearly solid mass of books: a vast economy which, so far as it is applied, would probably quadruple or quintuple the efficiency of our repositories as to contents, and prevent the population of Great Britain from being extruded some centuries hence into the surrounding waters by the exorbitant dimensions of their own libraries.
- The End -
FOOTNOTES:
1- In Der alte und der neue Glaube
2- xxi, 25.
3- First of all it seems to have referred to the red capital letters placed at the head of chapters or other divisions of works.
4- Cic. Pro Archia poeta, vii.
5- Essays Critical and Historical, ii. 228.
6- The Prayer Book recently issued by Mr. Frowde at the Clarendon Press weighs, bound in morocco, less than an once and a quarter. I see it stated that unbound it weighs three-quarters of an ounce. Pickering's Cattullus, Tibullus, and Propertius in leather binding, weighs an ounce and a quarter. His Dante weighs less than a number of the Times.
7- See Libraries and the Founders of Libraries, by B. Edwards, 1864, p. 5. Hallam, Lit. Europe.
8- Hor. Ep. II. i. 270; Persius, i. 48; Martial, iv. lxxxvii. 8.
9- Edwards.
10- Rouard, Notice sur la Bibliotheque d'Aix, p. 40. Quoted in Edwards, p. 34.
11- The Director of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, which I suppose still to be the first library in the world, in doing for me most graciously the honors of that noble establishment, informed me that they full-bound annually a few scores of volumes, while they half-bound about twelve hundred. For all the rest they had to be contented with a lower provision. And France raises the largest revenue in the world.
12- Note in illustration. Let us suppose a room 28 feet by 10, and a little over 9 feet high. Divide this longitudinally for a passage 4 feet wide. Let the passage project 12 to 18 inches at each end beyond the line of the wall. Let the passage ends be entirely given to either window or glass door. Twenty-four pairs of trams run across the room. On them are placed 56 bookcases, divided by the passage, reaching to the ceiling, each 3 feet broad, 12 inches deep, and separated from its neighbors by an interval of 2 inches, and set on small wheels, pulleys, or rollers, to work along the trams. Strong handles on the inner side of each bookcase to draw it out into the passage. Each of these bookcases would hold 500 octavos; and a room of 28 feet by 10 would receive 25,000 volumes. A room of 40 feet by 20 (no great size) would receive 60,000, It would, of course, be not properly a room, but a warehouse.


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