The Acquisition of Books by Chetham’s Library, 1655–1700 (review)

Chetham’s library was founded through the generous 1653 bequest of Humphrey Chetham, and from then until the end of the seventeenth century it acquired c. 3000 books, maps, and instruments, making it not only the first public library in Britain but one of the finest institutional libraries of the period. Matthew Yeo’s study focuses precisely on the processes by which Chetham’s holdings were acquired and what those tell us about the world of the book in later seventeenth-century England. Successive chapters discuss the Library’s foundation, the activity of the trustees in selecting its texts, Robert Littlebury (the Library’s chief, London-based supplier), and three categories of work that the Library acquired: theology; classics, history, and law; and natural philosophy.

Yeo’s material is fascinating and he draws from it a number of important lessons for historians of the book. In particular the fact that Littlebury was not a member of the Stationers’ Company, but a Haberdasher who procured books from the Continent and by participating in the thriving second-hand trade and publishing works himself, reminds us of the dangers of paying attention exclusively to the Stationers’ and their limited monopoly. Yeo repeatedly reveals how the Library’s suppliers sought to use the institution as a way of ridding themselves of slow-moving stock, but he also shows that the Trustees, far from being dupes, sought out particular works and often refused to accept the volumes they were offered. The evolving contents of the Library thus reflected a number of trends and concerns of the later seventeenth century: the desire to develop a reference library for Manchester’s divines and professionals, containing volumes that could counteract the phenomenon of ‘information overload’; the changing politics of Anglican theology and identity; continuing respect for sixteenth and early seventeenth-century editions of works in a range of genres; a gradual shift in emphasis from Continental to British scholarship; and a wish to heal (through avoidance) the damaging factionalism of the recent Civil Wars.

Yeo’s didactic style frequently leads him to state his conclusions repeatedly — so as to let you know what he is going to say, what he is now saying, and what he has said — at the expense sometimes of a more measured development of the argument and presentation of the evidence. Sometimes, alas, his evidence is thin or his argument weak. In suggesting (p. 227) that the Trustees avoided purchasing manuscripts because, as objects that were liable to be recycled in the making of pie cases or used to light fires, they were considered ephemeral, he seems to be explaining the cause by the effect: had the Trustees chosen to acquire manuscripts they would surely have been able to preserve them against the depredations of cooks and household servants, so their decision not to tells us something more interesting about their view of printed matter as the repository of scholarship. He correctly stresses materiality, but in relation to the mathematical and optical instruments acquired by the Library his startlingly familiar conclusion is that we have no evidence that these were ever employed for their instrumental function. This is unsurprising, since instrument historians wrestle continually with the issue of the extent to which commercially-distributed instruments were used by their owners. It is startling, however, given that one of the known functions for instruments in this period was precisely to furnish a library, and because the presumption that the mathematical instruments might have been used for ‘experimentation and research’ (p. 211) is rather naïve. In a few places Yeo’s assertions seem both unsourced and unwise. When he names a number of books ‘missing from the Library that were expected to be part of a large library’s scientific holdings in the seventeenth century’ (p. 204), one is left to wonder on what possible basis such an expectation could have been...