lexandria in Egypt was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC. Quintus Curtius Rufus, a Roman historian who lived in the reign of Claudius and wrote more than four centuries after the event, noted in his History of Alexander that the founding took place immediately after Alexander’s visit to the shrine of the Egyptian god Ammon, “the Hidden One”, where the priest addressed Alexander as “son of Jupiter”. In this recently acquired state of grace, Alexander chose for his new city the stretch of land between Lake Mareotis and the sea, and ordered his people to migrate from neighbouring cities to the new metropolis. “There is a report,” wrote Rufus, “that after the king had completed the Macedonian custom of marking out the circular boundary for the future city-walls with barley-meal, flocks of birds flew down and fed on the barley. Many regarded this as an unfavourable omen, but the verdict of the seers was that the city would have a large immigrant population and would provide the means of livelihood to many countries.”1
People of many nations did indeed flock to the new capital, but it was a different sort of immigration that ultimately made Alexandria famous. By the time of Alexander’s death in 323, the city had become what we would call today a “multicultural society”, divided into politeumata or corporations based on nationality, under the sceptre of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Of these nationalities, the most important aside from the native Egyptians was the Greeks, for whom the written word had become a symbol of wisdom and power. “Those who can read see twice as well,” wrote the Attic poet Menander in the fourth century BC.2
Though traditionally the Egyptians had set down much of their administrative business in writing, it was probably the influence of the Greeks, who believed that society required a precise and systematically written record of its transactions, that transformed Alexandria into an intensely bureaucratic state. By the mid-third century BC, the flow of documents was becoming unwieldy. Receipts, estimates, declarations and permits were issued in writing. There are examples of documents for every kind of task, no matter how small: keeping pigs, selling beer, trading in roasted lentils, keeping a bath-house, undertaking a paint job.3 A document dating from 258–257 BC shows that the accounting offices of the finance minister Apollonius received 434 rolls of papyrus in thirty-three days.4 A lust for paper does not imply a love for books, but familiarity with the written word no doubt accustomed the citizens of Alexandria to the act of reading.
If the tastes of its founder were anything to go by, Alexandria was destined to become a bookish city.5 Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, had engaged Aristotle as a private tutor for his son, and through Aristotle’s teaching Alexander became “a great lover of all kinds of learning and reading”6 — so keen a reader, in fact, that he was seldom without a book. Once, travelling in Upper Asia and “being destitute of other books”, he ordered one of his commanders to send him several; he duly received Philistus’s History, a number of plays by Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus and poems by Telestes and Philoxenus.7
It may have been Demetrius of Phalerum — a scholar from Athens, the compiler of Aesop’s fables, a critic of Homer and a student of the celebrated Theophrastus (himself a student and friend of Aristotle) — who suggested to Alexander’s successor, Ptolemy I, the founding of the library that was to make Alexandria famous; so famous that 150 years after the library had perished, Athenaeus of Naucratis thought it superfluous to describe it to his readers. “And concerning the numbers of books, the establishing of libraries, and the collection in the Hall of the Muses, why need I even speak, since they are in all men’s memories?”8 This is unfortunate, because where exactly the library stood, how many books it housed, how it was run and who was responsible for its destruction are all questions for which we have no satisfactory answers.
The Greek geographer Strabo, writing towards the end of the first century BC, described Alexandria and its museum in some detail but never mentioned the library. According to the Italian historian Luciano Canfora,9 “Strabo doesn’t mention the library simply because it wasn’t a separate room or building” but rather a space attached to the colonnades and common room of the museum. Canfora surmises that the bibliothekai or bookshelves were set in recesses along a broad covered passage or alleyway. “Every niche or recess,” remarks Canfora, “must have been dedicated to a certain class of authors, each marked with an appropriate heading.” This space eventually expanded until the library was said to house nearly half a million scrolls, plus forty thousand more stored in another building attached to the Temple of Serapis, in the old Egyptian quarter of Rhakotis. When we consider that, before the invention of printing, the papal library of Avignon was the only one in the Christian West to exceed two thousand volumes,10 we begin to understand the importance of the Alexandrian collection.
The volumes had to be collected in great numbers, since the magnificent purpose of the library was to encapsulate the totality of human knowledge. For Aristotle, collecting books was part of the scholar’s labours, necessary “in the way of memoranda”. The library of the city founded by his disciple was simply to be a vaster version of this: the memory of the world. According to Strabo, Aristotle’s collection of books was passed on to Theophrastus, from him to his relative and pupil Neleus of Scepsis, and from Neleus (though his generosity has been questioned)11 it finally reached Ptolemy II, who acquired it for Alexandria. By the reign of Ptolemy III, no single person could have read the entire library. By royal decree, all ships stopping at Alexandria had to surrender any books they were carrying; these books were copied, and the originals (sometimes the copies) were returned to their owners while the duplicates (sometimes the originals) were kept in the library. The established texts of the great Greek dramatists, stored in Athens for actors to transcribe and study, were borrowed by the Ptolemys through the good offices of their ambassadors and copied with great care. Not all the books that entered the library were genuine; forgers, noting the passionate interest with which the Ptolemys collected the classics, sold them apocryphal Aristotelian treatises that centuries of scholarly research later proved false. Sometimes the scholars themselves produced forgeries. Under the name of a contemporary of Thucydides’, the scholar Cratippus wrote a book called Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid, in which he made happy use of bombast and anachronism — quoting, for instance, an author who had lived four hundred years after Thucydides’ death.
Accumulation of knowledge isn’t knowledge. The Gallic poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius, several centuries later, mocked the confusion of the two in his Opuscules:
You’ve bought books and filled shelves, O Lover of the Muses.
Does that mean you’re a scholar now?
If you buy string instruments, plectrum and lyre today:
Do you think that by tomorrow the realm of music will be yours?12
It was obvious that a method was required to help people make use of this bookish wealth — a method that would enable any reader to trace a specific book to which his interest led him. Aristotle no doubt had a private system for retrieving the books he needed from his library (a system of which, alas, we know nothing). But the number of books shelved in the Alexandrian Library would have made it impossible for an individual reader to find a particular title, other than by an amazing stroke of good luck. The solution — and another set of problems — appeared in the guise of a new librarian, the epigrammatist and scholar Callimachus of Cyrene.
Callimachus was born in North Africa around the beginning of the third century BC and lived in Alexandria for most of his life, first teaching at a suburban school and then working at the library. He was a wonderfully prolific writer, critic, poet and encyclopedist. He began (or continued) a debate that hasn’t reached its end even in our time: he believed that literature should be concise and unadorned, and denounced those who still wrote epics in the ancient manner, calling them garrulous and obsolete. His enemies accused him of being unable to write long poems and of being dry as dust in his short ones. (Centuries later, his position was taken up by the Moderns against the Ancients, the Romantics against the Classicists, the Big American Novelists against the Minimalists.) His main enemy was his superior at the library — the head librarian, Apollonius of Rhodes, whose six-thousand-line epic, The Voyage of the Argos, is an example of everything Callimachus detested. (“Big book, big bore,” was Callimachus’s laconic summation.) Neither has found great favour among modern readers: The Voyage of the Argos is still (if discreetly) remembered; examples of Callimachus’s art survive faintly in a translation by Catullus (“The Lock of Berenice”, used by Pope for his Rape of the Lock) and in William Cory’s version of an elegiac epigram on the death of Callimachus’s friend Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, which begins “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead”.
Under the no doubt watchful eye of Apollonius, Callimachus (it remains uncertain whether he himself ever became head librarian) began the arduous task of cataloguing the covetous library. Cataloguing is an ancient profession; there are examples of such “ordainers of the universe” (as they were called by the Sumerians) among the oldest vestiges of libraries. For instance, the catalogue of an Egyptian “House of Books” dating from circa 2000 BC, from the excavations in Edfu, begins by listing several other catalogues: The Book of What Is to Be Found in the Temple, The Book of the Domains, The List of All Writings Engraved in Wood, The Book of the Stations of the Sun and the Moon, The Book of Places and What Is in Them and so on.13
An imaginary portrait of Callimachus from the sixteenth century. (photo credit 13.1)
The system Callimachus chose for Alexandria seems to have been based less on an orderly listing of the library’s possessions than on a preconceived formulation of the world itself. All classifications are ultimately arbitrary. That proposed by Callimachus seems a little less so because it follows the system of thought accepted by the intellectuals and scholars of his time, inheritors of the Greek view of the world. Callimachus divided the library into shelves or tables (pinakoi) arranged in eight classes or subjects: drama, oratory, lyric poetry, legislation, medicine, history, philosophy and miscellany. He separated the longer works by having them copied into several shorter sections called “books”, so as to have smaller rolls that would be more practical to handle.
Callimachus was not to finish his gigantic enterprise, which was completed by succeeding librarians. The full pinakoi — whose official title was Tables of Those Who Were Outstanding in Every Phase of Culture, and Their Writings — apparently extended to 120 rolls.14 To Callimachus we also owe a cataloguing device that was to become commonplace: the custom of arranging volumes in alphabetical order. Before that time, only a few Greek inscriptions listing series of names (some dating from the second century BC) make use of alphabetical order.15 According to the French critic Christian Jacob, Callimachus’s library was the first example of “a utopian place of criticism, in which the texts can be compared, opened side by side”.16 With Callimachus, the library became an organized reading-space.
All the libraries I’ve known reflect that ancient library. The dark Biblioteca del Maestro (Teacher’s Library) in Buenos Aires, where I could look out the windows to see jacaranda trees covering the street in blue blossoms; the exquisite Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, surrounded like an Italian villa by orderly gardens; the venerable British Library, where I sat (so I was told) in the chair Karl Marx had chosen when he wrote Das Kapital; the three-shelf library in the town of Djanet, in the Algerian Sahara, where among the Arabic books I saw one mysterious copy of Voltaire’s Candide in French; the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where the section reserved for erotic literature is called Hell; the beautiful Metro Toronto Reference Library, where one can watch the snow fall on the slanted glass panes as one reads — all these copy, with variations, Callimachus’s systematic vision.
The Library of Alexandria and its catalogues became the models first for the libraries of imperial Rome, then for those of the Byzantine East and later for those of Christian Europe. In De doctrina christiana, written shortly after his conversion in 387, Saint Augustine, still under the influence of Neoplatonic thought, argued that a number of works from the Greek and Roman classics were compatible with Christian teaching, since authors such as Aristotle and Virgil had “unjustly possessed the truth” (what Plotinus called the “spirit” and Christ the “Word” or logos).17 In that same eclectic spirit, the earliest known library of the Roman Church, founded in the 380s by Pope Damasus I in the Church of St. Lorenzo, contained not only the Christian books of the Bible, works of commentary and a selection of the Greek apologists, but also several Greek and Roman classics. (However, the acceptance of the ancients was still discriminatory; commenting on a friend’s library in the mid-fifth century, Apollinaris Sidonius complained that pagan authors were being separated from Christian ones — the pagans near the gentlemen’s seats, the Christians near the ladies’.)18
How then should such diverse writings be catalogued? The keepers of the first Christian libraries made shelf-lists to record their books. Bibles were listed first, then glosses, the works of the Church Fathers (Saint Augustine at the top), philosophy, law and grammar. Medical books were sometimes listed at the end. Since most books were not formally titled, a descriptive title was applied or the first words of the text were used to designate the book. The alphabet sometimes served as a key for retrieving volumes. In the tenth century, for instance, the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when travelling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.19
A rare depiction of Richard de Fournival conversing with his mistress, from a thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript. (photo credit 13.2)
Perhaps the earliest example of subject cataloguing in medieval Europe is that of the library of Le Puy Cathedral in the eleventh century, but for a long time this type of cataloguing was not the norm. In many cases, divisions of books were established simply for practical reasons. At Canterbury in the 1200s, the books in the Archbishop’s library were listed according to the faculties that had the most use for them. In 1120, Hugh of Saint Victor proposed a cataloguing system in which the contents of each book were briefly summarized (as in a modern abstract) and placed in one of three categories corresponding to the tripartite division of the liberal arts: theoretical, practical or mechanical.
In the year 1250, Richard de Fournival, whose theories on reading and memory I described earlier, imagined a cataloguing system based on a horticultural model. Comparing his library to a garden “where-in his fellow-citizens might gather the fruits of knowledge”, he divided this garden into three flowerbeds — corresponding to philosophy, the “lucrative sciences” and theology — and each flowerbed into a number of smaller plots or areolae, each containing a table of contents or tabula (like the pinakoi of Callimachus) of the plot’s subject-matter.20 The flowerbed of philosophy, for instance, was divided into three areolae:
The “lucrative sciences” in the second flowerbed contained only two areolae, medicine and law. The third flowerbed was reserved for theology.
Within the areolae, each tabula was assigned a number of letters equal to the number of books held in it, so that one letter could be given to each of the books, and recorded on the book’s cover. To avoid the confusion of having several books identified by the same letter, de Fournival used typographical and colour variations for each letter: one book of grammar would be identified by a capital rose-red A, another by an uncial A that was pansy-purple.
Even though de Fournival’s library was divided into three “flowerbeds”, the tabulae were not necessarily allocated to subcategories in order of importance, but according to the number of volumes he had collected. Dialectics, for instance, was allotted an entire table because there were more than a dozen books on the subject in his library; geometry and arithmetic, represented by only six books each, shared a single table between them.21
De Fournival’s garden was modelled, at least in part, on the seven liberal arts into which the traditional medieval education system was divided: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Established in the early fifth century by Martianus Capella, these seven subjects were believed to embody the entire scope of human wisdom, apart from medicine, law and theology.22
A thirteenth-century Islamic library. A group of readers is consulting one of the carefully catalogued volumes stored flat on the small shelves in the background. (photo credit 13.3)
About a century before de Fournival proposed his system, other bookish men such as the father of canon law, Gratian, and the theologian Peter Lombard had suggested new divisions of human knowledge based on reconsiderations of Aristotle, whose proposed universal hierarchy of existence they found deeply appealing, but their suggestions were not taken up for many years. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, the number of works of Aristotle that had begun to flood Europe (translated into Latin from the Arabic, which in turn had been translated from the Greek, by such learned men as Michael Scot and Hermannus Alemannus) obliged scholars to reconsider the division de Fournival found so natural. Beginning in 1251, the University of Paris officially incorporated the works of Aristotle into its curriculum.23 Like the librarians of Alexandria before them, the librarians of Europe sought out Aristotle. They found him meticulously edited and annotated by Muslim scholars such as Averroës and Avicenna, his chief Western and Eastern exponents.
Aristotle’s adoption by the Arabs begins with a dream. One night early in the ninth century, the caliph al-Ma’mun, son of the almost legendary Harun al-Rashid, dreamed of a conversation. The caliph’s interlocutor was a pale, blue-eyed man with a broad forehead and frowning eyebrows, sitting regally on a throne. The man (the caliph recognized him with the assurance we all have in dreams) was Aristotle, and the secret words that passed between them inspired the caliph to command the scholars at the Baghdad Academy to devote their efforts from that night onwards to the translation of the Greek philosopher.24
A sixteenth-century portrait of Roger Bacon. (photo credit 13.4)
Baghdad was not alone in collecting Aristotle and the other Greek classics. In Cairo, the Fatimid library contained, before the Sunni purges of 1175, more than 1.1 million volumes, catalogued by subject.25 (The Crusaders, with the exaggeration induced by astonished envy, reported that there were more than 3 million books in the infidels’ hold.) Following the Alexandrian model, the Fatimid library also included a museum, an archive and a laboratory. Christian scholars such as John of Gorce travelled south to make use of these invaluable resources. In Islamic Spain too there were numerous important libraries; in Andalusia alone there were more than seventy, of which the caliphal library of Córdoba listed 400,000 volumes in the reign of al-Hakam II (961–76).26
Roger Bacon, writing in the early thirteenth century, criticized the new cataloguing systems derived from second-hand translations of the Arabic, which in his opinion contaminated Aristotle’s texts with the teachings of Islam. An experimental scientist who had studied mathematics, astronomy and alchemy in Paris, Bacon was the first European to describe in detail the manufacturing of gunpowder (which would not be used in guns until the next century) and to suggest that, thanks to the energy of the sun, it would one day be possible to have boats without rowers, coaches without horses and machines that could fly. He accused scholars such as Albert the Great and Saint Thomas Aquinas of pretending to read Aristotle in spite of their ignorance of Greek, and while he acknowledged that “something” could be learned from the Arabic commentators (he approved, for instance, of Avicenna and, as we have seen, he assiduously studied the works of al-Haytham), he considered it essential that readers base their opinions on the original text.
In Bacon’s time, the seven liberal arts were allegorically placed under the protection of the Virgin Mary, as depicted in the tympanum over the western portal of Chartres Cathedral. In order to achieve this theological reduction, a true scholar — according to Bacon — required a thorough familiarity with science and language; for the former the study of mathematics was indispensable, for the latter the study of grammar. In Bacon’s cataloguing system of knowledge (which he intended to detail in a huge, never-completed and encyclopedic Opus principale), the science of nature was a subcategory of the science of God. With this conviction, Bacon fought for years to have the teaching of science fully recognized as part of the university curriculum, but in 1268 the death of Pope Clement IV, who had been sympathetic to his ideas, put an end to the plan. For the rest of his life Bacon remained unpopular with his fellow intellectuals; several of his scientific theories were included in the Paris condemnation of 1277, and he was imprisoned until 1292. It is believed that he died shortly afterwards, unaware that future historians would give him the title “Doctor Mirabilis”, the Wonderful Teacher, for whom every book had a place that was also its definition, and every possible aspect of human knowledge belonged to a scholarly category that aptly circumscribed it.
A scribe busy at his craft, sculpted in the thirteenth century on the Western Portal of Chartres Cathedral. (photo credit 13.5)
The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed — the learned social and political categories, and the physical categories into which a library is divided — constantly modify one another in ways that appear, over the years, more or less arbitrary or more or less imaginative. Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion. After the Jesuit order was dissolved in 1773, the books stored in its Brussels house were sent to the Belgian Royal Library, which, however, had no room to accommodate them. The books were therefore kept in a vacant Jesuit church. As the church was infested with mice, the librarians had to devise a plan to protect the books. The secretary of the Belgian Literary Society was commissioned to select the best and most useful books; these were placed on shelves in the centre of the nave, while all the others were left on the floor. It was thought that the mice would gnaw their way around the edges, leaving the central core intact.27
There are even libraries whose categories do not accord with reality. The French writer Paul Masson, who had worked as a magistrate in the French colonies, noticed that the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris was deficient in Latin and Italian books of the fifteenth century, and decided to remedy this by compiling a list of appropriate books under a new category that “would save the prestige of the catalogue” — a category that included only books whose titles he had made up. When Colette, a long-time friend, asked what was the use of books that did not exist, Masson’s answer was an indignant “Well, I can’t be expected to think of everything!”28
A room determined by artificial categories, such as a library, suggests a logical universe, a nursery universe in which everything has its place and is defined by it. In a celebrated story, Borges took Bacon’s reasoning to its uttermost reach, imagining a library as vast as the universe itself. In this library (which in actual fact multiplies to infinity the architecture of the old Buenos Aires National Library on Calle Méjico, where Borges was the blind director) no two books are identical. Since the shelves contain all possible combinations of the alphabet, and thus rows and rows of indecipherable gibberish, every real or imaginable book is represented: “the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the falsity of these catalogues, the demonstration of the falsity of the real catalogue, the gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true account of your death, a version of every book in every language, the interpolation of every book in all the other books, the treatise the Venerable Bede might have written (and never wrote) on Saxon mythology, the lost books of Tacitus.” In the end, Borges’s narrator (who is also a librarian), wandering through the exhausting corridors, imagines that the Library itself is part of another overwhelming category of libraries, and that the almost infinite collection of books is periodically repeated throughout a bookish eternity. “My loneliness,” he concludes, “is cheered by this elegant hope.”29
Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children’s Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not — or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader — the curious reader, the alert reader — to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned.
Colossal head of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great. (photo credit 13.6)