A short bibliography of the library and the bibliography or;how to bite your own tail
...Gabriel Naudé’s Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque, first published in 1627, presents wall-system furnishings as the accepted norm. Although he devotes extensive passages to the ordering of the books in the shelves as an aid to memory, Naudé draws no explicit connection between that order and the spatial configuration of the library. How he conceived this can, however, be inferred from a close reading of the Advis, which is written in an elliptical but engaging style for those already familiar with the subject. Often reprinted and translated into Latin and English, Naudé’s comprehensive guide to the collecting, arranging and administering of a large library was widely read and
frequently cited by later writers on libraries. [note 11: G. Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Paris, 1627 ), cited here from the 1879 reprint of the 1644 edition and the translation published by A. Taylor (Berkeley, 1950 ). I have emended the translation as noted. A Latin translation, by an unknown hand which Taylor calls ‘less than certain’ was published in A. Smid, De Bibliothecis nova accessio collectioni Maderianae adiuncta (Helmstedt, 1703 ). For significant excerpts and a consideration of Naudé’s importance see Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. V , pp. 295-331 is P. Nelles, ‘The library as an instrument of discovery', in D. R. Kelly (ed.), History and the Disciplines (Rochester, 1997 ), pp. 41-57.]
The first extended consideration of the wall-system library as providing instruction to those who view it appears in Hermann Conring’s 1661 epistolary encomium on the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel, one of the largest and most respected libraries in the seventeenth century. Covering a wide range of general topics, this substituted for the treatise on library matters that Conring had not been able to produce. [note 12: H. Conring, De Bibliotheca Augusta Quae est in arce Wolfenbüttelensi (Helmstedt, 1661); reprinted in J. J. Mader, De Bibliothecis atque archivis virorum clarissimorum … libelli et commentationes (Helmstedt,1702); cited here from the reprint in H. Conring, Opera (Braunschweig, 1703; reprint Aalen, 1973). Summary and excerpts (with significant ellipses) in Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. V, pp. 376-86 , with commentary by M. Palumbo.] Less extensive than Conring but advancing essentially the same position are brief passages in Jean Garnier’s 1678 catalogue of the Jesuit Library in Paris and the introductory gloss on it in Johann David Köhler’s 1728 compendium of library texts, [note 13: J. Garnier, Systema bibliothecae collegii parisiensis societatis jesu (Paris, 1678 ); Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. V , pp. 549–62; J. D. Köhler, Sylloge aliquot scriptorum de bene ordinanda et ornanda Bibliotheca (Frankfurt, 1728); Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. V, pp. 522–3. On Köhler, see D. Schmidmaier, ‘Bibliothekswissenschaftliche Bestrebungen an der Altdorfer Universitätsbibliothek zwischen 1630 and 1800’, Zentralblatt fur Bibliothekswesen 98 (1984), p. 19.] as well as Conyers Middleton’s 1723 proposal for the reordering of the University Library in Cambridge. [note 14: C. Middleton, Bibliothecae cantabrigensis ordinandae Methodus (Cambridge, 1728); reprinted in his Miscellaneous Works (London, 1752); Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. VIII , pp. 28-31.] In his 1665 commentaries on the Vienna Court Library, Peter Lambeck simply advocates the wall-system as essential for any princely book collection. [note 15: P. Lambeck, Commentarii de Augustissima Bibliotheca Caeserea Vindobonensi (Vienna, 1665-1779), vol. I , pp. 69-71; quoted in Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. V, pp. 68-9.]
Although silent on the question of immediate perceptibility in a single look, two late-seventeenth-century texts clearly elucidate the underlying conception of early modern libraries as easily accessible condensations of knowledge similar to encyclopaedias and bibliographies. Heinrich Hottinger’s 1674 Bibliothecarius Quadripartitus includes a small but comprehensive treatise on the assembling and ordering of a library, preceding three sections on theological bibliography. [note 16: H. Hottinger, Bibliothecarius Quadripartitus (Zurich, 1674). Long passages with commentary in Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. V , pp. 415-45.] Discussion of libraries is integral to Daniel Morhof’s Polyhistor literarius, a guide to the world of learning in the form of an extended, annotated bibliography. Appearing in multiple editions and re-printings between 1688 and 1747, the Polyhistor was widely read not only in Germany but also beyond. [note 17: D. G. Morhof, Polyhistor literarius (Lübeck, 1688-92; subsequent editions Lübeck, 1707, 1714, 1732, 1747); the book’s complex publication history is discussed by G. Maggiano in Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. VI , pp. 41 ff.]
The latest and most comprehensive consideration of the wall-system library and the propaedeutic overview is found in the Dissertationes philologicobibliographicae of 1747 by Oliver Legipont, the first standalone treatise since Naudé but also the last to advance the early modern conception of the library he initiated. Although apparently little read outside the monastic context for which he wrote, Legipont is significant because he picks up and expands upon the issues raised by the earlier authors. [note 18: O. Legipont, Dissertationes philologico-bibliographicae (Nuremberg, 1747); excerpts and commentary by M. Menato in Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. VIII, pp. 92 ff. Menato mistakenly calls the Dissertationes the first comprehensive examination of the relation between collection, space, and users, ignoring the continuities with earlier texts outlined here and setting up a false continuity with nineteenth-century biblioteconomia. J. G. Becker, ‘Bibliotheksreisen in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 21 (1980), cols. 1372-3, notes that Legipont is not cited in travel accounts and by those visiting libraries in the later eighteenth century, which does not discount his significance in the present context.]
A markedly different conception is evident in the disparate texts on libraries by Leibniz published after his death. [note 19: Leibniz’s many texts on libraries and books have not been published as a group, and a thorough analysis of them is beyond the scope of the present essay. The best general studies are M. Palumbo, Leibniz e la res bibliothecaria. Bibliografi e, historiae literariae e cataloghi nella biblioteca privata leibniziana (Rome, 1993); and, albeit somewhat outdated, L. M. Newman, Leibniz and the German Library Scene (London, 1966).] A strenuous advocate of the library’s utility and unsympathetic to any form of ostentatious display, Leibniz rejected both the separation of formats and the immediate perceptibility of the library space. Nevertheless, he was fully committed to the conception of the library as an accessible, because ordered, condensation of knowledge.
As such the library was little different from the various textual compendia central to intellectual life in the early modern period. Indeed, this congruence between the textual and the physical, between the conceptual and the real, is evident in the twin senses of the term bibliotheca (library). It applied equally to both an organized list of citations and an organized collection of actual books, meanings now distinguished as bibliography and library. The slippage between the two senses is most evident in Morhof’s Polyhistor, where the student/scholar is admonished to know both. Similarly, Leibniz used the library (in the sense of book collection) and the encyclopaedia as reciprocally reinforcing metaphors to explain how to both collect, condense and arrange more knowledge than the human mind can contain on its own. [note 20: Palumbo, op. cit. (note 19), pp. 11-2 , 22-3. For the dual sense of bibliotheca see M. Cocchetti in Serrai, op. cit. (note 6), vol. III , p. 11.]
Eric Garberson, 'Libraries, memory and the space of knowledge', Journal of the History of Collections vol. 18 no. 2 (2006) pp. 208-209.
(photo: M. Goosen, Biblioteca Central, UNAM, Mexico DF)
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