The Library: A Fragile History

Beatrice di Caro: From the World Economic Forum. I'm Beatrice di Caro and this is the Book Club Podcast. Hello and Happy New Year from the World Economic Forum Book Club. If your goal in 2023 is to read more, there's no better place to go than to a library. In this episode, we're joined by two academics from the University of St Andrews in Scotland who have coauthored The Library: A Fragile History. In their book, Professor Andrew Pettegree and Dr. Arthur der Weduwen journey from the mysterious lost library of Alexandria in Egypt to the public libraries of philanthropist Andrew Carnegie that still stand today, explaining how humans have shaped libraries and they in turn have shaped us. Despite our love of collecting books, they have often been neglected and become tools and targets during times of war, while romance novels have gone from scourge to saviour of the modern-day library. My colleague Kate Whiting joins us to interview them and to ask them what inspired them to write the book.

Andrew Pettegree: Hello. My name's Andrew Pettegree. I'm Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrew's. I've been working on the history of communication and books for most of my career and I'm the Director of the Universal Short Title Catalog, which is an attempt to map all publishing in the first two centuries of print. So I've written extensively on the book culture of the Renaissance Period, on early print, on news culture, and now on libraries.

Arthur der Weduwen: Hello, I'm Arthur der Weduwen. I'm a research fellow at University of St Andrew's as well. I come from from Amsterdam, Netherlands, but I've lived in the UK for about a decade now. I started my research really dealing with the history of newspapers and news media and from that transitioned into the history of publishing more broadly. And since then having worked in many different libraries and archives around the world. So the history of collecting in libraries themselves.

Kate Whiting: Brilliant, it's great to meet you both and thank you for your time today. So I guess the first thing is that this book, The Library: A Fragile History, it's quite a weighty tome and as I understand it, it's taken a lot of research a long time to write, but it is fascinating and it also looks beautiful as well, which we'll get on to a bit later on. But the history of the library is essentially the history of the book, isn't it and book collections. So I wonder if we could start by defining what we mean when we're talking about the library and whether we can also set that in a global context?

Arthur der Weduwen: Certainly, I mean, Andrew and I have a very flexible, generous interpretation of the definition of the library. Really we're talking here about any purposefully assembled collection of books. So that can mean a collection of of three books, or it can mean a collection of 100,000. And we need to keep this flexibility because we have what was a distinguished library throughout history has changed a great deal in thinking about quantity. If you're dealing with the 13th century, a collection of a handful of exquisite manuscript books would be an absolute pride and joy of of a of a prince or ruler. But, you know, several centuries later, three books doesn't mean all that much. And all of a sudden a library requires many more books. And really, you know, what is a book itself has of course, also changed over time. So that includes handwritten books, printed books, it includes digital books in our age. But before the emergence of the of the codex around... in the days of the Roman Empire, books would be written in in many different types of ways. They could be written on papyrus scrolls, inscribed on and tablets. And indeed, if you look at a much more sort of global history of knowledge transmission, textual culture, you'll see that what we conceive as the standard for of the book is much more flexible. If you take into account how the Indigenous Cultures of the Americas, for example, would produce their books. So we tried to be as flexible, as inclusive as possible.

Andrew Pettegree: And I guess it all begins Andrew am I right in Alexandria, in ancient Egypt, which seems to have been the first library and that's sort of where you start the book, really. Why was it such an extraordinary place?

Andrew Pettegree: Well, it was an extraordinary library because it was such an enormous collection. And we must remember here that it's a collection of scrolls mostly inscribed on papyrus at that time, which set considerable problems with storage, filing and organization. But it was also an attempt to create an academic and scholarly academy gathering together all the best scholars in the Greek world in this new town of Alexandria, where they were provided with accommodation, free food, very generous salaries. So not a small number accept this opportunity. They managed also to recruit some very distinguished librarians who did a lot of work inventing cataloging systems and storage systems, you see through the centuries. And of course, it's also famous not just the mere scale of the book, something between 200,000 and 500,000 scrolls, but also for the mystery of its disappearance. Nothing survives the Library of Alexandria today and it doesn't really need to be a mystery because papyrus is an extremely good surface on which to inscribe text, but it's very vulnerable to doubt. So every two or three generations it needs to be recopied to preserve the text. And with a collection of this scale, obviously that was a task beyond anyone with the result that they probably just molded away.

Kate Whiting: And I think that's something we see so frequently throughout the book, isn't it, that actually books over the centuries have unfortunately been lost for all sorts of different reasons. And at this point, I'm very rudely going to skip over the centuries of scrolls and the books that were carefully being transcribed by monks to public libraries to get more into the modern history of the library, as it were, and talk about Andrew Carnegie of Scotland, who moved across to the US and was a major influence on the establishment of public libraries in the UK in the US, with many still standing today. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit, Arthur, around why he was such a big influence on the public library movement?

Arthur der Weduwen: Well, Carnegie also was a true visionary and had had immense influence, probably more influence than anyone else on the on the creation of public libraries. And I think I mean, we have to know a little bit of the prehistory that and the fact that, you know, most people will think that public libraries have been around for a very long time. And indeed, there have been lots of attempts throughout history to establish public libraries. But as late as the as the middle of the 19th century, there were very, very few public libraries around at all. And even when the public library's act was passed in 1850, in England buried which which basically allowed communities to introduce a break to the local taxpayers to erect a public library. Very few communities took up this initiative. There's lots of reasons for that, but principally because many people who wanted access to books had access to a variety of different types of libraries that did not necessarily have to be funded by government itself. So Carnegie comes along really at the end of the 19th century, and his vision rests on on identifying communities that want a public library but don't have one, but haven't necessarily also got the capital, the means to to to introduce them. So he basically went to communities and said, you know, I will give you the capital to have a public library building. And that was often one of the crucial things that was lacking in library provision. As long as you commit to providing an annual fund that's a 10th of the of the capital, some of the domestic. So he allowed many small communities to to make that first step that otherwise they would not have been able to make. And this was a massive success, especially in the British Isles and in the United States, where Carnegie focused most of his philanthropic work.

Kate Whiting: And as part of your research, and I must say, before COVID, obviously before the pandemic, you were able to travel around the world, I would think, to visit many of these libraries. Do you have any sort of stand-out favorites among them?

Andrew Pettegree: I've actually been privileged to work in one of the oldest surviving libraries at Merton College, Oxford. Merton was founded in 1264, and the library was put together over the following centuries, and it still has a portion of its books chained that is chained to their shelves in order to preserve them from from being stolen. It's a terrible system because the whole purpose of books is that you consult one, two, three or four books together, which of course you cannot do if they're all chained to one place. But it didn't fall out of favor until the 18th century and many collections, people were still buying chains for their books. I've worked very often in the Bodleian, in the oldest part of the library, founded and established in 1602. Arthur and I have spoken for the Thomas Plume Library in Maldon, one of the parish libraries founded in the Great Burst, and one of the ones that still survives in its original building. And both of us together went to see some of the finest of the Jesuit libraries in Prague, the Klementinum. And what is striking about those libraries, but they seem to make no provision at all where you can sit down and read books. And it's mostly a matter of display of this great array of books.

Kate Whiting: The purpose or the role that libraries played has changed over time and initially public library was seen as a way to sort of educate the masses. And I think you talk about them at one point an instrument of social reform. But then also in South Africa, they were seen as a key tool for emancipation. So how has this sort of view of what a library ought to do changed over time?

Arthur der Weduwen: Well, I would say that the instrument of social reform or indeed control has been the strong goal in the early history of the public library, especially for most of the 19th century and still very much the early 20th century as well. You know, if if if the government is going to provide or the local post central government is going to provide libraries to people, libraries need to have a good purpose. People need to be improved to the extent that in some some libraries, librarians will often hide improving nonfiction literature amongst the best stacks of slightly more recreational types of books in the hope that if they had a patron browsing, they might also stumble upon a good book and take it, take it away with them.

Kate Whiting: So I love the idea Is the author. It's almost like the gateway drug, isn't it, of a sort of like, if we can get them in with the fiction, then maybe they'll read the nonfiction. Yeah.

Arthur der Weduwen: And that was that was that continued to be very much the norm in libraries, where libraries start to play more of roles of emancipation. I think you can see in some societies where there is some segregation or or repression, where marginalized groups are allowed to have a space like a library, which then becomes very much a focal point for both education and for sort of intellectual movements to gather. You see this in South Africa in the early 20th century. You see it also in the southern states of the US with Jim Crow. But I should say that that's only those libraries that were funded properly or were equipped. So that's not a that's not sadly a universal story.

Kate Whiting: There was this idea around fiction that it wasn't seen to be really worthy of reading at all. And in fact, the novel was touted in New York, I believe as a cause of insanity at one point, you say in the book and it was seen as bad for you, probably in the same way that we think of screen time today maybe. But then interestingly, it shifts and becomes almost the key to library survival. I wonder, Andrew, if you can talk me through what happened with our feelings around fiction.

Andrew Pettegree: Well, the the war on fiction began almost as soon as a printing was invented. Some of the first books were romances of Arthurian legend and the prose works of that sort. And people regarded this is particularly unsuitable reading for women. There was a very successful romantic series called Amadis de Gaulle, and that was produced in lavish volumes. But people were very scary, scared of their wives and daughters getting their hands on this. And actually, Don Quixote was banned from being taken to the Spanish held lands in Central and South America. So it's no new thing. What you do get when you come along to the public libraries is the sort of age old dilemma of all media. Should they be aiming at instruction and improvement, or should they be aiming at entertainment? And the whole justification of the Public Libraries Act of 1850 was to educate the new industrial classes into their responsibilities as citizens. Now, of course, if you've done a 12-hour day in a factory, you don't want to come back to being home, to being hectored at by improving books. You want to have some relaxation. So for that reason, people tended to shy away from the public libraries and go instead to circulating libraries, commercial libraries run by the corner shops. And this really goes on into the 1940s until you get the coming of the paperback. And it dawns on the libraries that with it being now possible for most people to buy books for themselves, unless they let up a little on things like romance literature, they'd lose their customers altogether and their justification for existence would disappear. So it's really only in the 1950s and 1960s that the public library accepts its mission as a tool of recreation and entertainment to the extent of taking in lots of Mills and Boon and Harlequin books and things like that.

Kate Whiting: It's quite clear that women are largely missing from quite a lot of the history of the library and that they only really come to the fore as librarians during the war, but also that they're reading tastes, which are the romance novels are often criticized. So I'm quite interested in what role women have had in the development of the modern library.

Arthur der Weduwen: Absolutely. I mean, first of all, I think it's should be said that that women are often obscured in the historical record behind that sort of male family members when it comes to library building. This is often the case in, for example, aristocratic libraries where it's quite difficult to see whether the the wife in the relationship or the woman as head of the household was responsible for the acquisition or the growth of the library. We see this, for example, with King William, the third of England and his wife Mary the second. Where there is a the library is called King William's Library in the Netherlands. But it was his wife who collected almost all of it. But because she died before he did it, to sort of kept all the books. And that's how it's gone down in the historical record. I think I think women have played a very important role, especially in the late medieval periods when it comes to the creation of the first great sort of princely and royal libraries, because they were really the first patrons of this magnificent manuscript books of ours and and other high literature that really brought the attention of their husbands, the princes and kings, to the fact they could also acquire these these lavish books. So we see elements there. But you're really right that it's only with the era of sort of mass literacy and improvements, universal improvements in women's education, that you have the opportunity for many more women to be to be buying books, to be enjoying them, and to play an active role in the administration of libraries that would really see them come to the fore as librarians with the public library movement. First of all, very much in the United States of America, and then later also in Europe itself. And, you know, it's worth remembering this, even today, you know, in general, women tend to read more than men. And I think in terms of the patrons of public libraries today, women play an extremely important role, keeping them alive.

Kate Whiting: I know, you know, as a mother of two, I certainly used to be way more than I have to have done now that I have children. Yeah, I want to come to one of the sections of the book, which is called The War on Books. During the First and Second World War, libraries were instrumental books were sent to soldiers, but they also became weaponized, sort of effectively databanks that held maps that were used for combat missions. So, yeah, what role did libraries play during the war?

Andrew Pettegree: Well, this is this is a subject which I think to this point has been adequately treated. I mean, there's a lot of stress on tragic destruction and on and on bombing, as if books are always innocent victims. So actually, this is the new the next book I'm writing of, which is to be called The Book of War. And it makes the point that libraries and books are often also the seeds of the ideologies which lead to war. As you've said that databanks and knowledge and intelligence and science and technological advance. So they're actually very active in the process of war making. And this is particularly so with maps, because, of course, maps are polemical objects. We find in Germany before the Second World War that professors of geography in German universities are pursuing the idea of lebensraum of further German conquest long before the Nazis come at all. And indeed, when the Nazis come in, you have the perverse experience of them actually trying to suppress certain geographical texts as they give away their plans to to. So we have all of that before we come to issues like how authors fare in war. On the whole, not good. It's an extremely difficult time for new authors to make their way because of paper shortages and the role of war of books in war as providing comfort to civilians and of course being supplied in many thousands to not only soldiers but also prisoners of war, because they are a captive audience in every sense of the word. And the English prisoners of war in German camps particularly read enormously, not least because their German captors were much keener on them reading than they were on tunneling. So they made every effort to even allow them to take exams and professional qualifications. The German guards would help put out the chairs in the examination room because this was something they wanted them to do rather than to be trying to escape.

Kate Whiting: You also talk about the need to evacuate books as cultural treasures. And I might be pronouncing it incorrectly, but is it Leuven Library in Belgium was deliberately destroyed twice in both the first and then Second World War. And I would say the idea of libraricide sort of wiping out written record of entire cultures. Why are books and libraries targets of war Arthur?

Arthur der Weduwen: Well, this is sadly something that's really ubiquitous throughout human history. And I think really the answer to it is because they they represent both memory and they represent culture. And if you are intent on conquering or subjugating another nation or trying to destroy its heritage, then the library is is a very good target for that, sadly. Another key reason is that for for a long part of the history of the library, they've often also been mingled with archives and archives again as holding administrative records as holding, for example, in the 16th century know often land titles or deeds made them a very good target for example, during the Peasants War in Germany, where bands of peasants would often go to the monasteries, go to the monasteries who were their, often the overlords. And the first thing they would identify as a library, an archive room, and and burn or destroy all the documentation. Not necessarily because they hated books, but they hated the land deeds that title to the title to the monastery. So this is something you see, you see everywhere. I mean, the conquest of of Mexico, the destruction of literary heritage by the Spanish is what is a very good example. We know of so many examples from the last century and an awful side. But the one thing I would emphasize, too, is that for every case of libricide of the deliberate destruction, there's also cases of of book plunder and a sense that the conquerors, so to speak, also wish to preserve the literary heritage by taking it back home and then either studying it or restrict redistributing its spoils. And this is something the Swedes did, for example, in the 17th century, the Swedish Empire, which specifically had instructions to its officers whenever they entered a conquered town, they were to identify a local official that could point them out to any library so that they could then be shipped off and cast back to Sweden and then from Stockholm, neatly divided between all that university and cathedral libraries, where indeed much of the sort of German and Polish plunder still remains today.

Kate Whiting: So looking at the sort of wider, I guess, global context now, I think that was an interesting point that you make around the fact that when the West is largely thinking what's the role of libraries and do they have a future, low-income countries are actually establishing libraries or certainly the small mobile libraries. There's a proliferation globally. What impact have these had in parts of the world that don't have access to books or haven't have access.

Andrew Pettegree: Yes, mobile libraries, sadly, have diminished in the last 30 years and perhaps were abandoned to to to early something will come up. But to probably when we talk about the future of the libraries. But they were first of all, an enormous boom in rural areas. And then actually they played quite an important role also in wartime when libraries were temporarily closed because there's bombing. In the Global South, I think the network has grown more successfully through fixed libraries than it has through mobile libraries, partly because mobile libraries always depend on a network of roads, and those may not always be available to get to smaller communities. In recent years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent billions assisting libraries in the Global South to provide Wi-Fi access universally so that all people would have access to Wi-Fi and computers, very effective programs, always with the cooperation of the local authorities, local municipalities. But I think that will be tend to turn out to be transitional. I mean, we must be, I would think, within 20 years of being able to put a sort of web cloud over the whole earth, at which point people might be looking to go into libraries for computers in quite the same way they are today.

Kate Whiting: I suppose something that we've seen during the COVID pandemic is actually there has been reportedly a rise in reading and people buying books. And this idea that actually and I think you describe it beautifully as libraries are slow thinking spaces and a book creates a mindfulness class of one. So during the pandemic, have we seen a sort of return to reading? And how do you think books can help our mental health?

Arthur der Weduwen: I definitely feel that we've seen that return to reading. I mean, bookshops have done reasonably well after the pandemic, I should say. Libraries, many public libraries less so, but just because of forced closures rather than anything else. But my parents have continued to provide lots of services throughout. I mean, I think I think libraries and books are are incredibly important to people's mental health. And I think a lot of it comes from the sense that, you know, we have all this information available to us nowadays. Anyone with an internet connection can look up almost anything they want to. But there's also the sense that it creates a lot of pressure for people. The sense of all this information out there and also the fact you have so much thrust upon you. Whereas if you can go to a library, you can just you can browse to your own delight, you know, without any pressure on you. That's where you come to too much sort of slower thoughts. And also the the freedom to to go beyond what you would usually choose. You know, if you go on Amazon, it will recommend books to you. But it's things you will already like in the library. You can ask for recommendations, but you are at your liberty to choose whatever you want and to sort of take your path and see where it goes. And I think that combined with the general sort of... the library providing a quite space of reflection that is, I think, paramount for many people's mental health these days.

Kate Whiting: You start off the book talking about a library in London, in the UK, where they've had to fight for its survival and you come back to it at the end and you say that libraries only last as long as people find them useful. They need to adapt to survive. So I suppose my question is what is the fate of the modern day public library as offices have to compete for our attention and that funding is being cut in an increasingly uncertain world?

Andrew Pettegree: Well, I think they the books actually have a better future or a safer future to look forward to than public libraries. But here we mustn't here we mustn't confuse the situation in Britain with a global situation. I think in Britain we do have a crisis of the branch library that is small branches with a declining and ailing user ship where they can't now hold enough book stock to remain really interesting to anything other than the coal coal user ship. For instance, I use our local public library here in St Andrew's, but it probably only has about 2000 books on the shelves, whereas our local independent bookseller has 30,000 books. So to some extent, the browsing function you used to enjoy in libraries is being transferred to, to to these splendid independent bookshops. So I can see a situation in which branch libraries will either be handed over to the local community to use them to to run them as volunteers. This has happened very successfully for one of our Fife libraries, or they could easily be replaced by a mobile library. The read the sort of rebuilding of the mobile library network as happens very effectively on Orkney, for instance, because with an aging clientele for libraries, all mothers and children are largely stuck at home. You could see that their interests could be catered for equally well by a revived mobile service. What I would say is all the campaigners we talk to always put the case for the survival of the library in terms of computer space, the whole place to go to read newspapers, somewhere that if you're on your own home, you can go and see other people. And all of that makes good sense. But none of that had anything to do with books. And if you take out the books from the equation, then you just have one other council building and it's not at all clear why it should even be called the library.

Beatrice di Caro: That was the authors of The Library: A Fragile History, interviewed by my colleague Kate Whiting. Big thanks for joining us on the World Economic Forum Book Club Podcast. Please subscribe to this podcast, leave us a review, and don't forget to check out our sister podcasts, Radio Davos and Meet the Leader. This episode of the Book Club Podcast was presented by my colleague Kate Whiting and myself, Beatrice di Caro, production was with Taz Kelleher and Gareth Nolan. And thanks to our podcast editor, Robin Pomeroy. We'll be back soon, but thanks for listening and goodbye.