Libraries Revisited - Bev Russell, Library Director

(This column appeared in the January 6, 2008, Star-Herald)

MORE ABOUT LIBRARIES:

People have valued libraries and books from ancient times to the space age. Last week’s journey through the ages left off with a caravan of over 500 camels transporting over 100,000 books across deserts and walking in alphabetical order. Of all the stories I have heard about libraries, this one might be the most astounding to me.

Libraries entered their golden age with the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press. Actually Gutenberg did not invent the first printing press. That was invented by the Chinese centuries before Gutenberg. His adaptation was the use of metal letters and moveable type. The Chinese carved pages into wooden blocks and printed a whole page at a time. This limited them. They could only print one page of manuscript from each block, and when the wood blocks wore down, a whole new page needed to be carved again. Gutenberg’s moveable type allowed him to combine the letters to print a page and then take them apart to make a totally different page. The metal type lasted longer and could be used in endless combinations. A monastery scribe took years to copy one book. It only took Gutenberg about two years to make 300 copies of his Bible. The Bible was the first book he printed. About forty copies of the Gutenberg Bible are still in existence.

Many consider moveable type to be western civilization’s most important invention. Because of Gutenberg’s printing press, more people learned to read and write, and the demand for books exploded. Knowledge was no longer limited to the elite.

During this era, which we call the Renaissance, libraries spread across Europe. It fell to Renaissance librarians to protect these precious books from decay, fire and vandalism. One job description obligated the librarian to "preserve the books from damp and vermin, as well as from the hands of trifling, ignorant dirty, and tasteless persons". (The more things change—the more they remain the same!)

Often librarians had to replace damaged or missing books. Because of this another important innovation came into being—LIBRARY RULES! These Renaissance librarians had some real muscle. In cathedral libraries anyone who stole or damaged a book was threatened with excommunication. In one library a sign warned that anyone who attempted to "carry away one of these books by theft, by fraud, or in any other manner" would have his name "struck from the book of the living"! (I wonder if the Library Board would give that some consideration?)

Libraries came to the New World. The Library Company of Philadelphia became America’s first subscription library. Who else but Benjamin Franklin founded it! Eventually, it was copied all over the Thirteen Colonies. Franklin’s library was the basis for the modern Philadelphia library system.

The first free public library in the United States was the Boston Public Library, founded in 1854. The innovative Boston Public Library also created the first children’s department

I will skip over Melvil Dewey and the Dewey Decimal System, which probably won’t disappoint anyone.

An unschooled immigrant, named Andrew Carnegie, educated himself through his use of a library. When he retired in 1901, Carnegie gave away most his wealth to establish free public libraries throughout the English-speaking world. He chose free public libraries because, "They reach the aspiring, and open to these the chief treasures of the world – those stored up in books." Eventually, he gave away the equivalent of $3 billion and built more than two thousand public libraries. One of the last Carnegie libraries was dedicated in Scottsbluff, Nebraska on April 21, 1922.

Stay tuned—next week. I will wrap up this library journey through the centuries, taken from "The Library Book: the Story of Libraries from Camels to Computers" by Maureen Sawa. Happy New Year!

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