The British Library, and why I love librarians

We all know that Karl Marx wrote his revolutionary works sitting in the Reading Room of the British Library.  But did you know that the man who ran the British Library, and who came up with the original design for the reading room, was also a revolutionary, who helped to shape the 19^th century, just as Marx helped to shape the 20^th.

The British Library has moved now.  It occupies a modern building on Euston Rd, which is comfortable and efficient for staff and scholars alike.  It has free wifi, hundreds of lockers, and food outlets with decent coffee, and the computerized ordering system works fine.

But it will never give me the same buzz to enter the new building that I used to get when I walked into the central reading room of the old library, with its high domed ceiling, rows of desks radiating out from the centre, and leather upholstered chairs.  It was full of the ghosts of readers past.

The old British Library was an eccentric place.  The cataloguing system was – and remains – mysterious, and before computers, ordering a book involved consulting the printed catalogue and filling in a paper slip with various duplicates. Eventually the book appeared as if by magic at your numbered desk – or else the slip would reappear with an explanation as to why it couldn’t be found.  The lists of excuses included ‘Destroyed in Bombing’.  According to persistent rumour the non-appearance of books published as late as the 1960s was sometimes explained this way.

I’m sure when the whole show moved up the road, a lot of missing books were found – and perhaps a lot of others went missing.

Like every historian, I am so grateful to librarians.  They are the most important people in so much of what we do.  Bad librarians see it as their role to protect books from people, but good librarians – the vast majority – bring books and people together.  I have met many librarians who have helped me in my research, telling me about collections I might find useful, identifying mysterious initials or signatures, sharing their knowledge generously.

The conventional image of the librarian as a fuddy-duddy is also way off the mark.  Librarians have always been at the forefront of technological changes.  Today digitization and databases are making information more widely available; in the 19^th century, the British Library gave men and women free access to books at a time when most libraries were private, or accessible only by subscription.

Caricature of Anthony Panizzi (1797-1879). Caption read "Books". (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The British Library took shape under the supervision of a most unlikely guardian.  Antonio Genesio Maria Panizzi (1797-1879) was born in the duchy of Modena.  He studied law at the University of Parma and graduated in 1818.

This was a dramatic period in Italian history.  Napoleon’s invasion had shaken up the conservative 18^th century political world.  After his fall the old regimes came back, but new ideas of liberalism and nationalism had been unleashed.  Secret societies such as the Carbonari emerged.  In 1822, Modena’s chief of police was killed.  In the crackdown that followed, a number of his friends were arrested and put on trial.  Panizzi escaped to Geneva where he wrote a book about the trials.  This led to him being tried, condemned to death, and executed in effigy.

Like Marx several decades later, in May 1823 Panizzi arrived in England as a penniless political exile, teaching Italian to bankers and merchants in Liverpool, but within a few years he had carved out a reputation as a scholar.  In 1828 he became Professor of Italian in the newly founded University of London, and in 1831, he joined the staff of the British Museum as an assistant librarian.  He did both jobs simultaneously until 1837, when he was promoted to Keeper of Printed Books.  He became Principal Librarian in 1856.

Panizzi may have come to librarianship by a circuitous route, but he seems to have had all the standard characteristics of the profession.  Firstly, he was an empire builder, constantly asking for extra money from the British Government to fund a bigger collection.  Between 1837 and 1845 the average parliamentary grant was £3600 p.a., but Panizzi argued it up to £10,000 p.a.

In 1842, Parliament passed a Copyright Act that still requires British publishers to deposit a copy of every book in the British Library.  It was part of his job to enforce this rule.

As the number of books grew, Panizzi experienced the standard librarian’s headache – where to put all the books?  So he made plans to enclose the central courtyard of the British Museum.  The Round Reading Room was opened in 1857.

UK - London - Bloomsbury: British Museum - Reading Room (Photo credit: wallyg)

Finally, like a lot of librarians I have known, Panizzi was a networker.  He was close to various figures within the Liberal establishment – Henry Brougham in the early days, later William Gladstone.  He used his political contacts to promote the Library – and to promote the cause of revolution in Italy.  He didn’t think much of Mazzini – another Italian in exile in England – but corresponded with Cavour, and when Garibaldi visited England in 1864, Panizzi played an important role, introducing him to the political establishment.

Panizzi was knighted in 1869, and died in 1879.  By all accounts he could be cantankerous.  He had long quarrel with Thomas Carlyle who objected to the fact that he couldn’t roam the shelves of the British Library, but had to order his books through the librarians.  Carlyle and his supporters founded the London Library on an alternative model: a high subscription, and free access to the shelves.  I believe the London Library is wonderful – but I’ve never been inside.  I can’t afford the subscription for the sake of a few weeks of access, every few years, and I prefer the free model Panizzi espoused when he said:

I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.

Antonio Panizzi, Evidence before Select Committee on British Museum, 7 June 1836, quoted in Edward Edwards, Lives of the Founders of the British Museum (1870) and requoted in Wikipedia

P.R.Harris, Sir Anthony Panizzi, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (available through subscribing libraries only – oh, the irony, the irony!)

On Shifting Sands

The British Library recently called for volunteers to help ‘georeference’ over 700 historic maps of London, England and Wales.  They digitized the maps but needed the assistance of real live human beings to read the maps, and link them to equivalent maps on Google Earth, in place, size and projection.

It’s yet another fascinating experiment in crowd sourcing – but I’m afraid you can’t join in, because they got so many volunteers that the work was completed within a week!  They now plan to load another 1000 digital maps.  If you want to get involved you can register and they will notify you when they are ready to roll.

According to the accompanying video, the technology of linking past and present geographical features seems fairly straightforward: they use the Tower of London as an example, and it’s been in the same place for nearly a thousand years.

Other geographical features on a landscape are trickier.  Where is the Fleet River these days?  Rivers are particularly vulnerable – they are constantly being diverted by urban development, or silt up because of agricultural development upstream.

Coastlines change too.  Many ancient ports have silted up – like Ostia, the port of Imperial Rome – but they usually do so fairly slowly.  Sometimes though, geographical features change comparatively quickly, with historical consequences.  If we leave aside catastrophic events like tsunamis or earthquakes, we are still left with the gradual impact of wind, water and sand.

Here in southeast Queensland, shifting sand dunes have changed the landscape since Cook passed this way in HMS Endeavour 1770, and make historical map-making a challenge.

The Brisbane River empties into Moreton Bay, which is enclosed behind a barrier of large sand islands, Bribie, Moreton and Stradbroke Islands.  Cook sailed along this coast on 16 and 17 May 1770.  A strong southerly gale, rocky outcrops and shoals led him to name the various geographic features Mount Warning, Point Danger and Point Lookout.  He identified Moreton Bay, and named it after Lord Morton, the President of the Royal Society, but he didn’t realise that he was passing to the east of a series of coastal islands rather than the mainland.  His course is charted here.

But maybe, in 1770, they weren’t islands at all.  Sand islands move gradually, as the dunes build up on one side and break up on the other.  Only the few rocky outcrops, such as at Point Lookout, remain as the sand ebbs and flows around them.

When Brisbane became a settlement in 1824, Moreton Bay became the shipping route between Brisbane and the outside world, with a fair number of shipwrecks.  In early September 1894, the Cambus Wallace was wrecked off Stradbroke Island.  The local residents turned out to help rescue most of those on board.  The Brisbane Courier reported on 5 September:

The scene of the wreck is only about two hundred yards off the shore, but the surf which is constantly breaking over her would render it a rather risky task to swim ashore.  Portions of the cargo, such as cases of spirits, salt, dynamite, and large pieces of wreckage, are to be seen strewn along the beach of the Island for about two miles, and the Customs authorities are doing their best to prevent…thefts…

All this activity damaged the grasses that stabilised the dunes, and more damage occurred when they blew up the dynamite, fearing it might become unstable.  Two years later, during another winter storm, the sea broke through at what is now called Jumpinpin.

The shipwreck and its aftermath undoubtedly hastened this event – but it was inevitable nevertheless, part of the constant pattern of erosion that has affected the area for millennia.  In the 1880s, one old Aborigine remembered that his father had told him about the days when Moreton and Stradbroke Islands were so close that people could shout across the gap.  Similarly, the gap between South Stradbroke (as it has been since 1896) and the Southport Spit is growing all the time.  In 1770, there may have been no gap there at all.

So Cook’s maps are wrong now, and sailors in Moreton Bay need to update their charts regularly, if they don’t want to risk running aground on newly formed sandbars.  Coastlines are dynamic, and we need to remember that.

As someone who loves historical maps, though, I’m really looking forward to checking out the British Library’s scanned collection.  It will be fascinating to see how London ebbs and flows around those fixed (relatively fixed) points such as the Tower of London.

Ellie Durbidge and Jeanette Covacevich, North Stradbroke Island (2004)
Thomas Welsby, Memories of Amity (1922)
South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific 1760-1800

This time in 2011:
Their Ghosts may be heard: The Rise and Fall of the Australian Labor Party (and boy! how relevant was that?) 24 February 2011

The Value of Manuscripts

It happens rarely – but it does happen.  People steal manuscripts, autographs, stamps, seals, maps and illustrations from libraries.  Last July, Barry Landau, author of The President’s Table: Two Hundred Years of Dining and Diplomacy (2007), was caught with an accomplice, Jason Savedoff, stealing documents from the Maryland Historical Society.  Since then, police have found about 10,000 documents in their apartment.

‘I cannot believe it,’ Lynn von Furstenberg, the second wife of Prince Egon von Furstenberg and a close friend of Landau’s for many years, told The Daily Beast. ‘The things I’ve been reading about him in the press are not the Barry I know. He’s just this gregarious, sweet, sensitive human being.’

Well yes, maybe.  On Amazon, Landau is described as a ‘historian’ – but as those of us in the profession well know, anyone can call themselves a historian.  There’s no quality control outside the university system, and since non-academic historians do a lot of important work, I don’t really want any – but sometimes someone goes rogue.

Working in archives, in major libraries, or small institutions such as the Maryland Historical Society, historians often have access to very valuable items – and for some people the temptation can be overwhelming.  I remember hearing many years ago about a university lecturer who was caught stealing 19^th century stamped envelopes from the British Library.  He collected stamps, so knew what items to look for.  He came from a ‘good’ background and the whole affair was hushed up – so successfully that he got a Chair at an Australian university that undoubtedly knew nothing about his background.

Every library has a security problem, and as the value of items rises, the chance rises that rare books will be pilfered for their maps and pictures, or autograph letters and envelopes will disappear out the door, concealed in folders of notes.

Libraries fight back, of course.  At the British Library, and similar libraries, you can only take things into the reading rooms inside clear plastic bags, and most repository libraries have metal detectors, though security people are mainly concerned with keeping dangerous items out, rather than keeping precious items in.

In manuscript rooms, security is higher still.  I remember visiting Southampton University library to read a section of Lord Shaftesbury’s diary.  Before they handed me the volume, they weighed it, and weighed it again when I returned it.  Apparently this is standard procedure in manuscript libraries, but most do it out of sight of the readers.  Southampton decided that doing it publically was a more effective deterrent.  (In case you are thinking of replacing a few pages of A4 in the folio, it is very hard to get the substitute weight exactly right.)

Fencing these thefts is relatively easy with EBay and the like.  Many of these thieves are not interested in the money though, or not just the money.  Like the stamp collector in the British Library, often they are collectors who see the concrete objects in front of them, and recognize their intrinsic value.  Where we historians tend to see only the words on the page, they see the page itself.

Meanwhile the relationship between philately and history cuts both ways.  Many years ago, I spent a lot of time working on the letters of Florence Nightingale in the British Library.  I’m not sure when, and how, these letters arrived in the library, but before they did, somebody tore off the stamps, no doubt so that some child could stick them in a stamp album.  Where the stamp was on an envelope, this didn’t matter a great deal (though it would to someone wanting to know when and where they were posted), but many letters were folded and sealed, with the address and stamp intrinsic to the letter.  When the stamp was torn away, it left a gap in the letter itself.

On the other hand, many letters only survive because of the enthusiasm of stamp collectors.  In 2006 the Mitchell Library in Sydney bought 10 letters written in Australia by ‘David’ in 1920, and posted to Mrs Dudley Ward in England.  A Canadian philatelist bought them, presumably because of their high value Australian stamps, but they hadn’t been read and their significance wasn’t recognized, until someone recognized the name ‘Dudley Ward’.   In 1920, the Prince of Wales, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David – known to his family and friends as David – visited Australia, from where he sent passionate letters to his mistress, Winifred (Freda) Dudley Ward, the wife of a British MP.  Freda never spoke of her long affair with the Prince, and who knows how those letters came to be in Canada, but without a stamp collector, they might have disappeared long ago.

For historians like me, the words on the page are what matters, not the page itself.  I’ve no desire to collect stamps or autographs or old maps, but I recognize that some people do, so it is wonderful when honest collectors make their collections available digitally – as here and here, for instance.

Meanwhile I’m happy to read digitized versions of documents when they are available.  Though I am sad that this will make visits to overseas libraries less necessary in the future, it certainly makes research a lot cheaper and more accessible.

I still can’t make my mind up about one thing.  Since we know that an illicit market for valuable items exists, and since libraries and archives hold such tempting collections of these items, should they judiciously sell off some of their originals?  Every historical instinct screams NO, but perhaps releasing lots of copies of Florence Nightingale’s signature on to the market would depress its value, and make theft less likely.  Your thoughts?

This time last year:
White Collar Work: doing the laundry, 10 February 2011