Previously published in Takahē Literary & Arts Journal (Part One)
Dedicated to the Shekera family, my brave Ukrainian friends, who conduct their lives under a hail of Russian missiles.
In the years preceding the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, two significant private libraries were established in Northland: the Anglican mission libraries of Kerikeri and Waimate North. I was three-and-a-half years old when my family moved to Kerikeri, and even during those pre-school years I was fascinated by books. My dad, always keen to encourage my reading, pulled a local history book from a shelf and read out an entry. ‘Every day, Bishop Selwyn walked ten miles there and back to consult the Waimate North Mission library.’ Surprised, I asked why anyone would insult a library. My father loved telling that story, but offences against libraries still trouble me.
This morning I learned from friends in Ukraine that an important state library had been destroyed in a Russian missile attack. It was the second such act of desecration this year. In those two attacks alone, 60,000 books were destroyed. Precision-bombing enables a modern military to avoid excess civilian casualties and cultural desecration. It is a matter of choice. The Russians’ decision to target the destruction of libraries has been a choice, then. The reason books are targeted is clear. When you attack books, you attack culture. This not only denies immediate access to the books, it also erases cultural memory. It is an attempt to blind the future.
The wilful destruction of books has been on my mind lately, having been reading several works that detail the systematic destruction of irreplaceable ancient libraries. Among them, the Great Library of Nalanda Mahavihara (India), the Great Library of Alexandria (Ptolemaic Egypt), the Pergamon Library (Hellenistic Anatolia), Ashurbanipal Library (Mesopotamia), the Imperial Library (Byzantium Constantinople), the Houses of Learning (Babylon), the books & archives (Qin China), the Imperial Library of Luoyang (Han China), the Library of Pantainos (Roman Greece), Emperor Hadrian’s Library (Roman Greece), the Library of Antioch (Roman Syria), the Library of Serapeum (Roman Egypt) … and so it goes on.
Throughout history, countless monastic, state and scientific libraries have been destroyed by kings, religious bigots and pillaging armies—a horror story burning its way through the wick of time and refusing to be consigned to the past. While not all of these ancient libraries were destroyed intentionally, most were. This wilful destruction is motivated by a simple truth: if you control knowledge, you can control the narrative.
The 20th century began with the Siege of Peking, where Western forces looted and destroyed the Hanlin Academy library. Thirty years later, the Nazis were burning books written by Jews, followed in quick succession by the bombing of libraries by the Axis forces, the Allies and the Japanese. Sadly, in my lifetime the destruction has continued. Pol Pot is an egregious example, being so keen to eradicate and re-boot history that he burned teachers and academics along with the books. (It was the United States’ carpet-bombing of Cambodia that lit that touchpaper.)
In fact, throughout the second half of the 20th century, civil wars, cultural revolutions, communal riots and cultural arson have continued, each iteration burning books like latter-day Savonarolas.
This century, fundamentalist zealots have burnt numerous priceless texts in places like Mali (Timbuktu), Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are destroying libraries right now—both Kiev and Gaza have had libraries bombed this week. It could also be argued that America is heading down a similar path with its ideological purging of books.
There is a term for an individual who burns books: a biblioclast. The act of destroying a library is biblioclasm or libricide. I learned this from a book in my own library, now quite rare: Holbrook Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania. Over its 550 pages, it traverses every aspect of bibliomania—collectors, biblioklepts, hazards, cures and biblioclasts. And, of course, the opposite of the book-hater or book-destroyer—the bibliophile.
The Anatomy of Bibliomania references a much earlier book titled The Anatomy of Melancholy, by the Elizabethan scholar Robert Burton. I possess a Victorian edition of that book. My edition is described as a ‘new’ publication, the original having been lost for many years, before being rediscovered in a private library. It is a delightful book with a spectacular frontispiece, and is not as gloomy as the title would suggest. This is because hundreds of years ago the term ‘melancholia’ could be used to describe a variety of moods. And this is something we wouldn’t know if works like Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Shakespeare’s plays had been lost, as they very nearly were.
For example, these shades of meaning are evident in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: ‘It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels ….’ The destruction of libraries evokes in me a melancholia in the Shakespearean sense.
Texts lost and found
On the plus side of the ledger are the amazing texts from ancient libraries which continue to be discovered. Texts emerging as palimpsests or fragments of papyrus found under desert sands or in walled-up caves. Modern technology is proving invaluable in revealing the once-lost words they contain. And the palimpsests are proving to be especially intriguing.
The word ‘palimpsest’ derives from the ancient Greek word ‘to scrape off.’ And so it is fitting that modern technology is helping us to visually ‘scrape back’ these artefacts’ layers to reveal other buried layers of meaning: proof that—because the parchment on which texts were transcribed was so valuable—it was indeed common practice for older texts to be scraped off a book or a scroll, and new texts added in their place. A Christian liturgical text could overlay a work by an ancient Greek philosopher, which itself would be a new rendition of earlier versions. The most famous of these is the Archimedes Palimpsest. The story of its discovery, and of the science that revealed the hidden text, is as exciting as any modern-day mystery novel.
The word ‘parchment’ is derived from Pergamon, a city in present-day Turkey, which once boasted one of the classical world’s greatest libraries. It is to the librarians of Pergamon that the invention of parchment has been attributed. These craftspeople monopolised the trade with their sturdy new product made from stretched animal skins, and in time put the makers of the less-durable plant-based papyrus out of business. Later, Mark Antony gave the contents of the library to Cleopatra, and the Pergamon scrolls ended up in the Library of Alexandria. After that, neglect and a civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony contributed to the scrolls’ eventual loss.
Even more amazing are the finds located in what appears to have been an ancient Egyptian rubbish-dump. Tiny pieces of papyrus stuck together in wads, hidden as the sands shifted. Radiography and spectroscopy techniques are now revealing these ancient texts, too, which contain information about pyramid building, private letters, and fascinating details about the lives of ordinary citizens. All of the above are gifts to us, remnants from greater ancient libraries that have been lost over time.
Thanks to archaeologists, scholars, bibliophiles, disobedient citizens and an irregular army of treasure-hunters, the erasure of books has proven difficult. Human curiosity militates against such folly. When, for example, the Qin Emperor ordered the destruction of all books and state records in 213BCE, scholars and poets carefully hid their books. It is believed that at least one copy of every book in that library was saved thanks to those ancient book-lovers. Among them is The Book of Songs, a collection of poems that predates the Qin dynasty.
The earliest known, dated, printed book, is The Diamond Sutra. It was printed on 11 May 868CE. It had been hidden in a cave along with 40,000 manuscripts and paintings during a period of social unrest in the Northern Song Dynasty. There it lay in the Mogao Library Cave (Cave 17) for 900 years until a Taoist monk discovered the entrance in around 1900CE. A Hungarian-born British archaeologist and explorer, Aurel Stein, heard of the cave’s discovery and acquired (i.e. bribed a guard or stole) the most precious of the manuscripts for the British Museum. The Diamond Sutra is a priceless document, and especially so to Buddhists like me. The text was supposedly communicated to a monk by Shakyamuni Buddha in around 500BCE.
The bibliophile Bishop Richard de Bury was born in England in 1287CE to a family of Norman descent. As a young man he became enmeshed in the intrigues of Queen Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, to depose Edward II. A wanted man, de Bury fled to Paris and hid until Edward III took the throne, upon which he returned to England and rose rapidly through the court ranks. Among de Bury’s many roles were Dean of Wells Minster, Bishop of Durham, Lord Treasurer and Lord Chancellor. This eventful political life did not, however, prevent de Bury from becoming an obsessive book collector; indeed it helped him exploit every opportunity he could to rescue and acquire books. It also presented him with opportunities to make the acquaintance of fellow bibliophiles, including Petrarch, whom he met while he was an emissary in Rome.
Moreover, de Bury used his influence and the state coffers to collect books and manuscripts from near and far, spurred on after observing how badly the ‘ignorant and neglectful’ monks treated their books. In doing so, he depleted his own wealth but enriched the nation. After his death, de Bury’s library formed the basis of great English libraries, including those now in Oxford. Several books bear his name, including the delightful Philobiblon. It is one of the earliest books about creating a library. (I have a nice facsimile copy.)
In the meantime, the Chinese had invented woodblock printing and, after that, moveable type. But it took a further 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press in the West. The potential of this form of mass printing for the dissemination and democratisation of knowledge was immediately recognised and feared by the churches and despotic kings, but it was too late: the age of mass media and influencers had arrived. Nevertheless, the fact that books could now be printed in large numbers and distributed quickly did not prevent them from disappearing, with those earliest printings—known as ‘incunabula’—now rare.
Save or purge?
Not all books are deserving of longevity, true; but the process of culling should be an organic one. Public taste, although not always right, tends to take care of this. The works of popular Victorian writers like Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli—writers who were lionised in their day—have quietly disappeared from shelves. Conversely, Dickens and Conan Doyle, who began writing cheap train-reads, have ended up as literary giants. And at the same time, another, much earlier literary reputation was undergoing a revival. Poet and playwright William Shakespeare, while immensely popular in his day, had soon fallen out of favour due to the rich poetical language and his use of metaphors as much as the embedded political undertones. It wasn’t until the Romantic era, a time of re-evaluation, that his plays began to be popularised again.
In my library, I possess works by authors such as Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, Richard Garnett and Osbert Sitwell. None of those once-popular authors is of interest to today’s readers, but their books survive in my library, and I am fond of them all. Books, good or bad, can offer insights into the past. There is currently a tongue-in-cheek fad for trashy, 1950s pulp fiction. What will be collectable in years to come is difficult to gauge.
Books of all sorts can become sought-after many years after publication and often obsolescence. A first edition, first printing, first release of Ian Fleming’s Bond novel Live and Let Die, for example, can fetch up to US$30,000 — arguably because no one thought it worth hanging onto when it first came out. That story and others like it once had me rummaging through car-boot sales. I don’t do that anymore, because I am now a recovering bibliophile (although I suffer the odd relapse). I am more likely to be tempted when confronted by new publications these days.
This brings me to the present, and with it to the painful realisation that I must now purge many of my own books. My library is a timeline of me, and most of the books in it were lovingly selected. Some for their typographical beauty, binding, illustrations or rarity, but most because I wanted to read them, each one reflecting my tastes over time. It is a comprehensive library of the humanities. I am not a scholar; in fact, I left school at age 16. I was educated not by teachers, but by my books.
My descent into biblioclasm . . . (to be continued in part two)
