The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland

It was at a meeting of the editorial board of the eighteenth-century volume of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain in Oxford in 1992 that I suggested to Andrew Brown that with the promise of having before too long a comprehensive history of the book in Britain, what was needed was a history of libraries in Britain. He warmed to the idea and before long I was engaged in planning how such a history might be compiled. Of one thing I was certain: that it could not be done without first engaging in a great deal of historical research. The corpus of writings about libraries in Britain from Saxon times to the present was extremely patchy, with yawning gaps in the period between the founding of the great aristocratic libraries of the English Renaissance and the dramatic expansion of the public, subscription, and circulating libraries after 1800. Aware that my own commitments at University College London, as well as the Chadwyck-Healey project to catalogue and film the major monuments in print for The Nineteenth Century, a project I administered at the British Library (still in progress), would make it impossible for me to act as General Editor, I eventually asked Peter Hoare, recently retired, to take responsibility for the content of the three volumes. They are only in parts what I had hoped for. On the other hand, while we still await the publication of five of the seven volumes of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, the three volumes of the History of Libraries in Britain (hereafter referred to as CHLB) have made it into print. Collaborative projects always take longer to complete than originally envisaged.

Volume I

Volume I is, in scope and detail, a thoroughly documented and illustrated account of collections of books wholly unlike what we have come to regard as a library. We cannot think of Bede or Alcuin as we think of Bale or Bacon, even if Bede had access to the collections of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow in the eighth century. Libraries that sought to organize and provide access to knowledge, past and present, did not take a form comparable with modern ideals before the seventeenth century. There were, of course, guides to knowledge, but these were rather in the form of catalogues than physical collections of books in one location, and form the basis for the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, in progress since 1990. For at least five hundred years from the founding of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, the history of libraries in Britain is a history of the various religious communities and of the contents of the armaria that were usually located in the cloister. Richard Gameson's chapter, 'The Medieval Library', is detailed and illustrated with plans of Rievaulx, Strata Florida, and Fountains, showing the tiny spaces allocated to book storage. Gameson has also illustrated other institutions with his own photographs (which unfortunately in printing turn out to be grey and murky). Clare Sargent's chapter, 'The Early Modern Library', is so brief that there is no mention of the various arrangements made in the period between the dissolution of the monasteries and the outbreak of the Civil War. What is missing here is any reference to the secular libraries acquired by learned antiquaries and the aristocracy.

The period of Tudor stately home architecture with provision for a library is important, and since some of the collections in situ today go back to the middle of the sixteenth century it is a pity they have been ignored here, though private libraries are given some attention by Pamela and David Selwyn in Chapter 21, 'The Profession of a Gentleman'. I am not at all sure...