The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) | Page 5

might bee, if it were animated
with a publick Spirit to keep and use it, and _ordered as it might bee for
publick service_" (p. 17, my emphasis). The public that Dury refers to
is an academic faculty and not the general public. To insure fullest use
he goes on to advocate the necessity of a printed catalogue with yearly
manuscript supplements to be issued as a cumulative printed
supplement every three years. He does not reach the point of proposing
a call-number system but stresses the importance of shelf-location
guides in the catalogue. He believes in aggressive acquisition policies
and the necessity of good faculty-librarian relations, with the former
advising the latter of the important books in their fields of
specialization. He urges what might now be called "interlibrary loan"
and other forms of sharing. To keep the librarian on the straight and
narrow, apparently a recurrent problem in Dury's day, he recommends
an annual meeting of a faculty board of governors where the librarian
will give his annual report and put on an exhibition of the books he has
acquired. To allay the temptation to make a little money on the side by
"trading" (Dury's obsessive term) in the library's books for his personal
profit, the librarian is to receive administrative support for his various
expenses during the year and, as a scholar working with other scholars
within his university instead of as a mere factotum, the librarian is to
receive an adequate salary (perhaps the only one of Dury's reforms that
must wait until the millennium).
The question remains to what extent Dury's duties as the deputy
librarian of the King's Library allowed him to implement the reforms
he advocated on paper. The probable answer is, not very much. The
librarian's duties and responsibilities described by Dury are those of an
academic, university librarian, interacting with the faculty and
participating fully in the intellectual life of a scholarly community. The
role of the librarian of the King's Library would have been that of
keeper of a static and isolated collection, and Dury is particularly

critical of a merely custodial role: "... their emploiment," he writes of
the typical librarian of his day, is "of little or no use further, then to
look to the Books committed to their custodie, that they may not bee
lost; or embezeled by those that use them: and this is all" (p. 16).
The King's Library was unquestionably magnificent; Charles's father
and brother Henry had been particularly zealous in building it up,
acquiring such collections as that of Isaac Casaubon. And Charles had
been the recipient in 1628 of perhaps its greatest single treasure, the
Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Bible in Greek,
certainly an item that would have interested Dury. The library had, in
fact, great scholarly potential, but its continued existence was
apparently an embarrassment to the Commonwealth, and the Puritan
government merely wanted an overseer. So, by the determination of
others, the post of deputy keeper of the King's Library was little but a
sinecure for Dury, leaving him free to pursue his many other interests
but powerless to implement the reforms he advocated in his pamphlet
within the only library over which he ever had direct control. Though
he retained the post until the Restoration, he left the library itself early
in 1654, never to return.
The DNB notes that Dury's life was "an incessant round of journeyings,
colloquies, correspondence, and publications." The account might also
have added that, sadly, it was a life of many failures and frustrations,
since his visionary scheme for the wholeness of life was so out of touch
with the jealousies and rivalries of those he encountered. But if the
larger vision that underlay _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ is now
merely a historical curiosity, the specific reforms that Dury advocated,
as seemingly impractical in his own time as his other schemes, proved
to be of lasting importance. Shorn of the millenarian vision that gave
them their point in Dury's own day, his ideas have become the accepted
standards of modern librarianship. Dury himself would not have been
heartened by his secular acceptance: "... For except Sciences bee
reformed in order to this Scope [of the Christian and millenarian
vision], the increas of knowledg will increas nothing but strife, pride
and confusion, from whence our sorrows will bee multiplied and
propagated unto posteritie...." (p. 31).
_Thomas F. Wright William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[Footnote 1: For Dury's biography, see J. Minton Batten, _John Dury,
Advocate of Christian Reunion_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1944).]
[Footnote 2: On the relation of Dury, Hartlib, and Comenius, see G.H.
Turnbull, _Hartlib, Dury and Comenius_ (Liverpool: University Press
of Liverpool, 1947).]
[Footnote 3: Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Three Foreigners: The Philosophers
of the Puritan Revolution," in his