No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.
Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler, 23 March 1751
The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading. For the Talmudic schools, as for those of Islam, a scholar can turn religious faith into an active power through the craft of reading, since the knowledge acquired through books is a gift from God. According to an early hadith, or Islamic tradition, “one scholar is more powerful against the Devil than a thousand worshippers.”100 For these cultures of the Book, knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book itself, but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience, in the words reflected both in the outside world and in the reader’s own being.
In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, the celebrated German mathematician, philosopher and jurist, declared that a library’s value was determined only by its contents and the use readers made of that contents, not by the number of its volumes or the rarity of its treasures. He compared the institution of a library to a church or a school, a place of instruction and learning, and campaigned in favour of collecting, above all, scientific titles, while doing away with books that he considered merely decorative or entertaining, and therefore useless. “A treatise of architecture or a collection of periodicals,” he wrote, “is worth a hundred volumes of literary classics,”101 and he preferred small books to the larger folios because they saved space and avoided, he thought, superfluous embellishments. He argued that the mission of libraries was to help communication between scholars, and he conceived the idea of a national bibliographical organization that would assist scientists in learning of the discoveries made by their contemporaries. In 1690 he was appointed librarian to the ducal library of Brunswick-Lüneberg in Hanover, and later he became librarian at the important Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel, a post he retained until his death in 1716. Leibnitz was responsible for transferring the Wolfenbüttel collection from its original site to a building he judged better suited to the housing of books, with a glass roof that let in natural light, and several storeys of shelving space. The wooden structure of the building, however, did not allow for heating, and those readers who bravely sought out the books’ wise words during the winter months did so with trembling hands and chattering teeth.102
Despite Leibnitz’s contention that a library should be valued strictly for its contents, books as objects have often been granted spurious authority, and the edifice of a library has superstitiously been seen as that authority’s symbolic monument. When, in Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir, an enthusiast of the Emperor Napoleon III is shown a book that portrays the monarch as a lecherous seducer, the poor man is incapable of finding words to defend his king because “it was all in a book; he could not deny it!”103 Even today, when little or no importance is accorded to the intellectual act, books, read or unread, whatever their allotted use or value, are often lent such awe-inspiring prestige. Fat volumes of memoirs are still authored by those who wish to be seen as powerful, and libraries are still founded by (and named after) politicians who, like the ancient kings of Mesopotamia, wish to be remembered as purveyors of that power. In the United States, a string of presidential libraries testifies to this desire for intellectual immortality (as well as tax relief). In France, every year offers a crop of confessional writings, candid recollections and even fiction by leading politicians; in 1994 ex-president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing went as far as demanding membership in the exclusive Académie Française, reserved for the elite of French intellectuals, on the strength of a slim romantic novel, Le Passage.104 He succeeded. In Argentina, both Evita and Juan Perón prided themselves on their auto-biographies–cum–political testaments, which everyone knew had been ghost-written. Wishing to dispel the image of an illiterate ruler, early on in his career Perón had himself invited by the Argentinian Academy of Letters to pronounce a speech on the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Cervantes—an author whose work, he laughingly confessed later in life, he hadn’t ever bothered to read,105 but whose large leather-bound, gold-lettered tomes could be seen behind him in several official photographs.
The Herzog August Wolfenbüttel Library.
The last great king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal.
King Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last important monarch, who ruled from 668 to 633 B.C., was fully aware of the association between rulers and the written word. He boasted that he himself was a scribe, though “among the kings, my forerunners, none had learned such an art.” His collection of tablets assembled in his palace in Nineveh, while meant for private use, nevertheless stated in the colophon of tablet after tablet, for all to read, that the power granted by the art of letters had been bestowed into his hands:
Palace of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria, who trusts in Ashur and Ninlil, whom Nabu and Tashmetu gave wide-open ears and who was given profound insight…. The wisdom of Nabu, the signs of writing, as many as have been devised, I wrote on tablets, I arranged the tablets in series, I collated [them], and for my royal contemplation and recital I placed them in my palace.106
Though Ashurbanipal, like hosts of rulers after him, claimed to be proud of his talents as a scribe and reader, what clearly mattered most to him was not the transformation of experience into learning but the emblematic representation of the powerful qualities associated with books. Under such rulers, libraries become not “temples of learning” (as the commonplace has it) but temples to a benefactor, founder or provider.
Centuries after Ashurbanipal, the symbolic value of funding a library has not much changed. Even during the Renaissance, when libraries in Europe became officially public (beginning with the Ambrosiana in Milan, in 1609), the prestige of funding, endowing or building such an institution remained the privilege of a benefactor, not a community. The notorious millionaires who, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made their fortunes in the factories, mills and banks of the United States assiduously used their money to establish schools, museums and, above all, libraries which, beyond their importance as cultural centres, became monuments to their founders.
“What is the best gift which can be given to a community?” asked the most famous of these benefactors, Andrew Carnegie, in 1890. “A free library occupies the first place,” he declared in answer to his own question.107 Not everyone was of his opinion. In Britain, for instance, the truism that “a public library is essential for the welfare of a community” was not officially proclaimed until 1850, when the MP for Dumfries, William Ewart, forced a bill through Parliament establishing the right of every town to have a free public library.108 As late as 1832, Thomas Carlyle was angrily asking, “Why is there not a Majesty’s library in every county town? There is a Majesty’s jail and gallows in every one!”109
Andrew Carnegie’s story does not allow for simple conclusions. His relationship to wealth and the culture of books was complex and contradictory. Implacable in his pursuit of financial gain, he donated almost 90 percent of his enormous fortune to fund all manner of public institutions, including over 2,500 libraries in a dozen English-speaking countries, from his native Scotland to Fiji and the Seychelles. He worshipped but did not love intellectual pursuits. “The public library was his temple,” wrote one of his biographers, “and the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column his confessional.”110 Brutal in the treatment of his workers, he established a private pension list to assist financially over four hundred artists, scientists and poets, among them Walt Whitman, who described his benefactor as a source “of kindest good will.” Though he believed in the sanctity of capitalism (what he called “the Gospel of Wealth”), he insisted that “a working man is a more useful citizen and ought to be more respected than an idle prince.”111
Carnegie’s beginnings, as he himself was quick to remind his listeners, were desperately poor. Two men exerted the greatest influence over his childhood in Scotland. One was his father, an able weaver of damask cloth, whose skills were soon made redundant by the new manufacturing technology of the Industrial Revolution. Will Carnegie was by all accounts a man of spirit who, in spite of being forced to work ten to twelve hours a day, found time to create with his fellow-weavers a small communal library in Dunfermline, a courageous act that must have strongly impressed his young son. The other was Carnegie’s uncle Thomas Morrison, a land-reform evangelist who preached non-violent opposition to the abusive industrialists and the end of what he saw as the enduring feudal system in Scotland. “Our rule,” he taught, “is Each shall possess; all shall enjoy; Our principle, universal and equal right; and our ‘law of the land’ shall be Every man a lord; every woman a lady; and every child an heir.”112 During one of the riots against the large linen manufacturers who were threatening, once again, to cut the wages of the weavers, Uncle Thomas was arrested. Though he was never formally charged, the incident marked the young Carnegie powerfully, though not enough to colour his business ethics. Years later, he displayed in his study the framed handbill with the charges, calling it his “title to nobility.” From such experiences, he said, he developed “into a violent young Republican whose motto was ‘death to privilege.’”113 And yet, when Carnegie ruled over his own factories and mills in Pittsburgh, his employees were forced to work seven days a week, were denied all holidays except Christmas and the Fourth of July, were paid miserly wages and were forced to live in insalubrious housing estates where the sewers ran alongside the water pipes. One-fifth of Carnegie’s men died due to accidents.114 In 1848, when Carnegie was barely thirteen, his parents became destitute. To escape famine, the family emigrated to the United States and, after a difficult crossing, settled in Pittsburgh, where they discovered that the situation of the weavers was scarcely better than back home. At length the young Carnegie found work, first at the Atlantic and Ohio Telegraph Company and later with the Pennsylvania Railroad. In the railroad offices, work ended early in the evening, leaving the boy time “for self-improvement.”
In downtown Pittsburgh, Carnegie discovered a free public library founded by a certain Colonel Anderson “for apprentices for whom school was not an option.” “Colonel Anderson opened to me the intellectual wealth of the world,” he recalled in 1887. “I became fond of reading. I reveled week after week in the books. My toil was light, for I got up at six o’clock in the morning, contented to work until six in the evening if there was then a book for me to read.”115
But in 1853 Anderson’s library changed locale and the new administration decided to charge all customers, except “true apprentices” (that is to say, those bound to an employer), a fee of two dollars. The sixteen-year-old Carnegie, an apprentice not officially “bound,” felt that the measure was unjust and, after uselessly arguing with the librarian, wrote an open letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. It appeared on 13 May 1853.
Mr Editor:
Believing that you take a deep interest in whatever tends to elevate, instruct and improve the youth of this country, I am induced to call your attention to the following. You will remember that some time ago Mr. Anderson (a gentleman of this city) bequested a large sum of money to establish and support a Library for working boys and apprentices residing here. It has been in successful operation for over a year, scattering precious seeds among us, and although fallen [sic] “by the wayside and in stony places,” not a few have found good ground. Every working boy has been freely admitted only requiring his parents or guardian to become surety. But its means of doing good have recently been greatly circumscribed by new directors who refuse to allow any boy who is not learning a trade and bound for a stated time to become a member. I rather think that the new directors have misunderstood the generous donor’s intentions. It can hardly be thought that he meant to exclude boys employed in stores merely because they are not bound.
A Working Boy though not bound.116
After a brisk exchange of letters, the harried librarian was forced to call a meeting of trustees, in which the question was settled in the boy’s favour. For Carnegie, it was a question of what he himself considered “fair usage.” As he was later repeatedly to prove, any argument of justice, any question of rights, any effort of self-improvement only carried weight if it ultimately succeeded in procuring Carnegie himself greater savings or greater power. “Money no object compared to power,” he said to one of his business partners some twenty-five years later.117
The United States of the late nineteenth century provided Carnegie with an ideal setting for his convictions. Called upon on one occasion to exalt the merits of American institutions in comparison to those of his native Scotland, he described his adopted country as “the perfect place to pursue one’s business.” In the United States, he argued, “the mind is freed from superstitious reverence to old customs, unawed by gorgeous and unmeaning show and form.” As his biographer Peter Krass points out, in Carnegie’s description of the American utopia “there was no mention of the cotton and iron riots in which the police forces were routed, no word of slavery, Indian relocation, or women’s suffrage in discussing equality of voice. [Carnegie] had a selective memory; he preferred to ignore America’s underside, as he would when making his millions in steel while his exploited workers died by the dozens.”118
Carnegie presenting his trust as “a Trustworthy Beast” to Uncle Sam, a cartoon from Harper’s Weekly.
Carnegie believed that a man must be ruthless if he was to become wealthy, but he also believed that such wealth should be employed in “illuminating the spirit” of the community he exploited. To his detractors, the libraries he funded were merely stepping-stones to personal glorification. He very rarely gave money for books, only for the building in which they were to be lodged, and even then he stipulated that the town provide the site and the cash to maintain the library. He insisted that his libraries run as efficiently as his mills, and that no extravagance be indulged in. Nor did he give to state libraries or subscription libraries, because these institutions had access to alternative funding. “He has bought fame and paid cash for it,” Mark Twain once quipped.119
Many criticized the Carnegie libraries as antidemocratic, judging them “centres for exerting social control on the working-classes,” “forcing upon the readers capitalistic ideas and values in an attempt to control their thoughts and actions.”120 Whatever the case, these libraries served a purpose well beyond Carnegie’s self-aggrandizement. When the architect who designed Carnegie’s first library asked for the millionaire’s coat of arms to be carved over the entrance, Carnegie, who had no such distinction, suggested instead an allegorical rising sun surrounded by the words “Let There Be Light.”121 For decades the Carnegie libraries remained a paradox: a monument to their founder, and a fruitful cultural instrument that helped awaken thousands of intellectual lives.
Dozens of writers have acknowledged their debt to the Carnegie libraries. John Updike, describing his own experiences as a teenager at the Carnegie Library of Reading, Pennsylvania, spoke of his gratitude “for the freedom given me in those formative years when we, generally speaking, become lifelong readers or not.” He concluded, “A kind of heaven opened up for me there.”122 Eudora Welty traced back to the Carnegie Library of Jackson, Mississippi, the beginnings of her literary life. As Carnegie had stipulated, his donation was conditional on the community’s undertaking to guarantee the upkeep and smooth administration of the library; in Jackson, in 1918, the librarian in charge of these tasks was a certain Mrs. Calloway. Mrs. Calloway, Welty recalled, “ran the Library absolutely by herself, from the desk where she sat with her back to the books and facing the stairs, her dragon eye on the front door, where who knew what kind of person might come in from the public? silence in big black letters was on signs tacked up everywhere.” Mrs. Calloway made her own rules about books. “You could not take back a book to the Library on the same day you’d taken it out; it made no difference to her that you’d read every word in it and needed another to start. You could take out two books at a time and two books only; this applied as long as you were a child and also for the rest of your life.” But such arbitrary rules made no difference to Welty’s reading passion; what counted was that someone (she did not then know who this distant benefactor was) had set up a treasure trove for her personally (she believed), through which her “devouring wish to read” was instantly granted.123
Andrew Carnegies bookplate.
The sarcastic critic H.L. Mencken objected. “Go to the nearest Carnegie Library,” he instructed, “and examine its catalog of books. The chances are five to one that you will find the place full of literary bilge and as bare of good books as a Boston bookshop.”124 But for most writers, even if the stock of books is not formidable, to be able to enter a place where books are seemingly numberless and available for the asking is a joy in itself. “I knew this was bliss,” Welty wrote late in life, “knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.”
Carnegie himself may have believed that the buildings he paid for would serve as proof of “my efforts to make the earth a little better than I found it.”125 Whatever his desire may have been, for hundreds of thousands of readers the Carnegie libraries became not the proof of any selfless or egotistical concern, or of a millionaire’s magnanimity, but the necessary intellectual stronghold at the heart of any literate society, a place where all citizens, provided they can read, are granted the basic right to make themselves “powerful against the Devil.”