Fiat Lux, Fiat Latebra: A Celebration of Historical Library Functions (review)

Fiat Lux, Fiat Latebra: A Celebration of Historical Library Functions. By D. W. Krummel. Urbana-Champaign: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, 1999 (Occasional Papers No. 209). 27 pp. $8.00. ISSN 0276-1769.

A skilled reader can finish Donald W. Krummel's short pamphlet in about an hour, which just proves the old adage that good things often come in small packages. For in the space of fewer than thirty pages, Krummel, who for years taught library history and other assorted subjects at the University of Illinois Library School until his recent retirement, distills a lifetime of learning, thinking, and writing in the field of library history to lead the reader across the centuries of libraries and librarianship.

Krummel's title comes from two Latin expressions, Fiat Lux and Fiat Latebra, which serve as a kind of yin/yang of librarianship. The first expression means "let there be light," and the second means "let there be a hiding place," and herein lies the author's thesis. Libraries serve a dual purpose: they shine a light on the writings and thoughts of the past through our efforts to maintain these texts and provide a hiding place or refuge to protect these same writings from the ravages of time. In so doing, libraries have served an historically essential function as the protector and transmitter of other eras' intellectual outpourings.

Having laid out his thesis, Krummel then outlines a deceptively simple structure for thinking about libraries over the past three millennia. He divides the ages of humankind into seven big chunks, each organized around a basic principle that governed library operations. It becomes quickly apparent in Krummel's schema that each transition in library function is associated with a corresponding change in the era's political environment. Thus to begin with, Krummel labels as the Quotidian Age the earliest period, coinciding with the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. The libraries (they were actually more archives than libraries) were concerned with keeping daily records for the political leaders. Few could read, and knowledge was, not surprisingly, in the hands of the powerful. Krummel considers the Greece of Aristotle and Alexander the Great the Academic Age, beginning around 300 b.c. The Alexandrian library with Callimachus's embryonic organizational scheme signaled the beginning of libraries as places where research could be conducted. With the eclipse of the ancient order, the West dis-integrated into several centuries of intellectual darkness. This unhappy situation was mitigated by the solitary efforts of Benedictine monks, who labored diligently copying texts, saving for another time our ancient heritage. For Krummel this is the Religious Age, which began around 500 a.d. Libraries and librarianship became a service to God while keeping alive the learning of the classical world.

Following the centuries of darkness, the personal libraries of the Renaissance poets and writers provided the light for the new age. This one Krummel calls, aptly, the Humanistic Age, beginning in the mid-fourteenth century. Libraries and the learning they fostered were assisted greatly by Gutenberg's printing press, and all these forces combined to accelerate the information revolution of the Middle Ages.

Krummel's deep erudition appears again and again throughout this sparkling essay, especially in his discussion of the next two periods: the Age of Reason, beginning around 1600, and the Age of Democracy, which gets its start 100 years later. The ideas of great thinkers like Francis Bacon, with his emphasis on reason, meet the plans of great organizers like Gabriel Naudé, whose classic Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1623) first described how to operate a proper library. The outbreak of democratic societies in the West prompted a host of new developments, including national libraries, national bibliographies, national copyright legislation, national educational systems, and, of course, public libraries. The spreading political freedom spurred a concomitant desire to have access to more and more free information, which libraries were quite willing...