BOOK DESTRUCTION PT. 2 of 5

So here it is, probably not as I read it since you make editorial decisions in the heat of the oratorial moment. No one laughed at the Judicial Astrological Virgin joke but what can you do. Let me know if you have any questions &c.

Dispatches from the Department of Acquisition and Destruction:  Robert Burton’s Books at the Bodleian

Brooke Palmieri, April 2011

Book Destruction Conference, UCL

I. INTRODUCTION

         A little over a year ago at Oxford while I was in my so-called ‘Anatomy of Melancholy Phase’ (holla if you’ve been there) I went to request a book belonging to Robert Burton, his ‘astrological notebook’ from the Duke Humphrey library. I had found it mentioned a few times; once in a 1926 Proceeding[s] of the Oxford Bibliographical Society initiated by W. W. Greg in order to collect specimens of early modern literary autographs; a second time in a 1981 essay by J.M Bamborough, describing the contents of the volume at length, partially in response to what he considered to be Greg’s neglect of its real value, that is, as the only surviving notebook from the prolific melancholic. It’s also in Kiessling’s bibliography of Burton’s library. But because I couldn’t find an online record the librarian said the book didn’t exist. I double-checked my sources, and finally after two more attempts, brandishing Kiessling wildly, another member of staff agreed to check the location of the book. Sure enough, upon his return I was handed Bod. 4to R9 Art. (Bod as in Bodleian; 4to as in shelved with the quartos, as books were stored by size in those days of lock-and-key-chaining-the-books-to-their-proper-places; the R9 puzzles me because it has nothing to do with the author which is the way books were listed, 9 because it is the 9^th book on the first shelf, and Art because it is in the Arts section, as opposed to Theology, Medicine and Jurisprudence, the four other categories under which books were separated when catalogued in the 17^th century.)

The problem is simply that too many people make too many requests per day for the overwrought staff to leap at everything, so as a matter of policy and SANITY if you’re going to order a printed book you have to do it online, and in advance. I’ve worked at a rare book library before, I am one of the lucky ones who has been asked the question “can you just find this book for me, I read it in here a few years ago and its binding is black and it’s entitled ‘short stories’ and it’s rare, I think”, so this procedure makes total sense to me. But what happens if a book doesn’t have an online catalogue entry? It seems to rephrase—and I know this sounds corny—the proverbial tree-in-a-forest puzzle: if a tree is stored in a library and there’s no way to recall it from the stacks, does it make a difference? Does it effect our histories, does it add to our knowledge of the past? I would call this a potential, very silent form of destruction, and it’s what I’d like to talk about today, the kind of destructiveness that follows, simply, from a library’s day-to-day maintenance; lying somewhere between our deepest ambitions to amass as much material as possible, and the need to organize it in some useful way. Where ‘book destruction’ brings up very compelling images of war, heavy artillery, and totalitarianism, instead I’m talking about the kind of destruction that is institutionalised. Out of necessity. And while digitisation both of books and of cataloguing systems casts these issues in the greatest, most immediate relief so far, I’ll leave that discussion for drinks and instead talk here about how there is a quiet destructiveness that haunts the archive, and it’s a habit that also happens to be historical tradition.

II. THE NOTEBOOK BY NICHOLAS SPARKS

         Before talking about these sometimes-caustic reading practices on an institutional level though I’ll mention their affinities with individual practice. Commonplacing, or indexing excerpts of reading for later, easy recall—has part and parcel to the life of the mind since classical antiquity, and books of this type were kept by famous scholars from Seneca and Quintillian throughout the middle ages to the towering Erasmuses, Gesners, and Casaubons of the early modern republic of letters. Copia was “in”, but the style never disavowed discrimination—even in collecting a theatre of all of nature one needs to cut out the excess somewhere.

One of the reasons finding Burton’s notebook was such a delight is that it fits perfectly into this tradition that has always fascinated me, it’s a real hack-and-saw kindof approach to reading practices, the stuff of horror movies in any other context. The book is a hybrid collection, 215 leaves strong, comprising of three printed pamphlets bound with Burton’s notes: Ptolemy’s classic text on astrology, and defense of its use, the Quadripartitum aka Tetrabiblos; John Dee’s Propaedeumata Aphoristica, missing its title page and preliminaries; and finally Leovitius’s work on Judicial Astrology and the construction of genitures Brevis et Perspicua Ratio Judicandi Genituras, which is also incomplete. Before and between these is about as many interleaved notes, commonplaces from over twenty other printed sources, tables of the latitude and longitude of several English cities, and astrological applications including the famous geniture wherein Burton predicts his death on his memorial at Christ Church cathedral. The book was bound together to be a working notebook: all of Burton’s notes are added after the book was bound, judging from the margins from the gutter and fore-edge. Burton bound these texts together with a lot of breathing space so that he might make the book a reference guide for the astrologer that could grow: I have it on good authority by a friend of mine at the Bod who is a binder that the first and last gatherings of the book are two DIY gatherings also in Burton’s hand, stitched in by Burton himself since they are not flush with the rest of the pages. Prior to the binding, the tattered pamphlets were themselves fairly expertly repaired—especially Dee’s, which really shows its age. I could talk more about the contents—for instance the section that heavily commonplaces Tycho Brahe’s opinions on the premiere question of judicial astrology Utrum virginitis sit deperdita. necne.” (“Whether virginity has been lost. or not”)—but for the purposes of this presentation I’m all about process. Burton’s book is a monster from the cataloguer’s perspective: half print, half manuscript, and half of the manuscript from printed sources; but for its time Burton’s book is also totally typical, even quite commonplace in the other sense of the word. So Milton’s right: books aren’t absolutely dead things, because once most early modern scholars got thru with taking them apart and putting them back together, they were positively undead, a Frankenstein’s monster of patchwork sources and ideas.

III. THE BODLEIAN AKA THE MAN

Plugging such a book back into the system, in some ways libraries make very similar decisions that Burton in creating his little book, the only STAGGERING difference is, when these types of decisions are made on an institutional level they shape scholarship on an institutional level, not on the level of the private study. When I go into the Duke Humphrey I am impacted by the decisions Thomas Bodley and Thomas James, the earliest librarian, centuries ago. Let’s start there, for instance. In 1599 Bodley took it upon himself to famously refurbish, restock and revive its dilapidated shelves. This is several decades before Burton’s collection would become apart of the library, so it sets the precedent. Officially opening its doors in 1602, according to Bodley’s letters to James, as early as 1604 the influx of books was so great that maintaining accurate, and legible records of the collection was a problem. There was at first the problem posed by duplicate books: Bodley writes to James “I pray yow keep a priuat note to your self, of all suche bookes as yow shall finde to be double, and make them knowen but onley to me, for auoiding suitours, that will be desirous to haue them.” Secondly there is the question of condition, according to Bodley: “Withall I could wishe, that yow kept secret to your self, whatsoeuer defectes or imperfections, yow may finde among the books in the binding, or otherwise, as yow sawe there were many in the binding of my L. Chamberlaines. For it may be that all suche errours and defectes will be, vpon your report, talked of more and otherwise, then were meete.”

The solution? That duplicates MUST be disposed of and the finest copy kept. In addition, the rebinding of books is encouraged at the expense of the donor (hence Neil Ker’s fantastic study of ‘Oxford Bindings’) as a counter against poor condition. In order to save time and money on binding, shorter books and/or pamphlets are bound together, or “coupled” as Bodley calls it in his letters. But when preparations are made to print the first catalogue of books in 1605, this gives rise to the same problem I encountered a few months ago. Bodley writes: “Where there are diuers autours bounde together, yow place all their names many times, vnder the first autours surname. As, with Picardus de Prisca Celtopaedia, yow ioine Smithus de Pronunciat[ione]. ling[ua]… and put not Smither at all, in the letter S, but onely, in P. whereby I turne mine Alphabet, to see whether Smithus be bought, missing him in S. I take him as vnbought.” Not only does this make finding stock impossible, but it makes a cycle out of buying and disposing of duplicates, as Bodley will buy books he does not find. Two types of destruction here, through sins of commission and omission both: the disposal of books a very intentional act, and their oversight a mistake, both occurring daily. The publication of that catalogue was in fact held up by these oversights. Bodley wrote that “I am further to tell yow from Mr Norton, that there are many bookes forgotten to be put in the Catalogue.” John Norton, printer and bookseller, had personally acquired many of these books he noticed missing. And I’m describing all of this without even making it to the point in history at which the Bodleian becomes a legal deposit library in 1610. You can imagine how the problems escalate. By the time of John Rous’s appointment to succeed James as librarian in 1620, binding costs and coupling books had increased according to the Bodleian Library Account Books (published by the Oxford Bibliographical Society) in order to accommodate the exponentially growing collection. This is the scene to which Burton’s legacy was added.

IV. NOW WHAT

Now as I’ve mentioned this book would be very interesting in its own right for its contents and what they tell us about the practices of the author of that great hulking book The Anatomy of Melancholy, but this whole process of even getting to call up the book from the stacks at the time made me into a kid that wants to play with the huge cardboard box rather than the toy inside—I wanted to know more about the container of the book, and not limited to the shelf on which it rests. So, back to talking about Burton’s book without really talking about Burton’s book. You may ask why, if Burton’s notebook is a notebook as I have called it to emphasise its manuscript contents, it’s nonetheless shelved in the Arts section of the old Duke Humphrey’s printed books. This is a good question—given that for instance Gabriel Harvey’s famous copy of Livy (the study of which is why I can pretty much write this now) is shelved as a manuscript in the British Library. One explanation gets to the language of Burton’s last will and testament, which specified that of his printed books, “If I haue any bookes the Vniversity Library hath not let them take them”. If the Bodleian rejected the books, the next item of the Will stipulated that Burton’s own Christ Church College library could take their pick. It was also Burton’s last wish however that “[A]ll such bookes as are written w^th mine own handes”, should be burned. The book survives, then, not only because it is printed, but also because these works were not yet apart of the University library’s collection. All of this is great, it gives credence to Milton’s words that that you, John Rous,  “Sunt data virum monumenta curae” (“to whose care the monuments of men have been entrusted”), are doing your job well.

The books entrusted to Rous by his friend Burton were recorded in “A note of MR Robert Burtons book given to the Libray by his Last Will and testament A^o Dm. 1639” (This can now be found in the Bodleian, MS Seld. supra 80, beginning at 163). Rous lists two of the three printed tracts in Burton’s notebook, with another tract listed in between, and no mention that they are bound together. He writes “Mutilus et imperfectus” as a blanket term that refers to both the imperfect state of Dee’s tract, as well as that of the Leovitius tract which was traditionally printed with it—or in other words he misses Leovitius altogether. Nor does he make any mention of the copious interleaved notes. Passive, this omission, but destructive as I said.

Looking up a number of the other 900 books Rous kept, for comparison’s sake, the moral of that story is, once a book enters a library it is by no means guaranteed a quiet life of permanence—these monuments are moveable, eraseable even. And once again their mutability brings us back to the act of coupling books together and discarding duplicates. Sometimes these acts occur immediately after a book has been accessioned, and sometimes they can happen much later as I found out.

If we can refer to the notebook as a hybrid book for its print and manuscript contents, the coupling up of different texts from different corners of the world is nonetheless another type of hybridizing in which the Bodleian partakes. Sometimes books are bound together because they relate to the same topic, as with Burton’s Bod 4^o E14(6) Art, a collection of six pamphlets from the 1630s, all of which relate to German and Swedish history. Sometimes however, books are bound together with less rigorous topical standards. Bod 4^o L81 (1) Art, for example, is a collection of twenty-one pamphlets that loosely relate, at first, to entertainments enjoyed by monarchs, fete books, but also proclamations and political pamphlets. But ultimately these two books are unique in that they consisted of books that had exclusively belonged to Burton. Gathering books first by their provenance and only after that by their subject matter was by no means the standard.

An example: in John Rous’s written record of the Burton library, he has listed a series of “Comodies & Tragedies” Burton owned. Interestingly, he notes (as opposed his notes on Astrological notebook) that this collection of printed plays was bound by Burton in “uno volumnus”. Looking to the book itself (Bod 4^o T 33 Art.) Burton has written the same list into the fly-leaf, it includes: “The woman hater, Michaelmas Terme, Westward Hoe, Eastward Hoe, Euery man in his humor, Faire maide of the Exchange, Sumers last will & Testament, and Vextummus”—eight plays. Several notes have been made, in pencil beside Burton’s list, attributing each play to its author. In ink beside Vextummus, it has been added that the text was a triplicate copy, and thus “taken out June. 1865”. In fact, only Middleton’s The Woman Hater (1607, with Burton’s name and the date inscribe 1611) remains. After that, the entirety of the book is filled with blank paper, with a note in pencil that “These blank leaves were inserted by Mr. Wilmut [a conservator] on Oct 1926 to fill the spaces left in the binding by the extraction of the plays wh. this volume formerly contained.” (As a side note—this kind of conservator’s documentation is rare!)

As to the whereabouts of the plays extracted, another note dating July 24^th, 1929 accounts for four of them in the Malone collection, with their new call numbers. (Eastward hoe. 1605. Mal.241(6) Everyman his humour. 1601. Mal.229(1) Faire maide of the Exchange. 1607. Mal.193(3) Summers last will. 1600. Mal.212 (5)) The note also explains that these plays were only shifted to replace the titles in the collection due to their condition: “Apparently the \original/ Malone copies were disposed of as duplicates as being inferior in condition”. Not only did the organising interests change from grouping the plays in a way that preserved the collection of their former owner Burton, but also the change was in the interest of displacing copies Malone had acquired due to their condition. In this way, the library books belonging to Burton (d. 1640) seem to compete with those of Edmond Malone (d. 1812), to the detriment of preserving the histories of both. Funnily enough, the library as a unit of meaning has very limited cache once it is amalgamated into a larger library.

V. CONCLUSION

So, we’ve got our work cut out for us. If, as some have argued, the history of reading offers a deeply problematic approach to analysing books because it privileges traces of readership that are exceptional, and difficult to extrapolate to a broader historical scale, the history of accessions and distributions of books across libraries validates that and makes it worse. On one level it offers precisely the larger historical scale into which we can fit even the most anomalous hybrid notebooks, since the practice of disassembling books was as common among readers as it was on an institutional level. But on a more confusing note, libraries provide the next obstacle to the field, by introducing an entirely different set of organizational standards that bear down with sometimes destructive rigor on the way in which books are collected and shelved. The Bodleian’s accession of Burton’s library alone shows the range of cataloguing practices that can be applied to any set of books, as well as reveals other collections housed in Bodley as equally vulnerable. There are instances where its standards have not changed, but there are also many variables introduced by the library: from changes in the staff, the budget, new technology, or even the perceived interests of collections. The ideal set of cataloging standards offered by Bodley as by any library are as much products of historical happenstance as they are of intention. In this way, I hope you haven’t found my presentation to be anti-library or anti-librarian in any way. These types of mistakes can happen no matter what, so my aim is not to attack. If anything, what I hope I’ve shown is that these perpetual mistakes not only humanise our study of books, but make human intervention even more important. These lovely little human errors that become to great stories in the history of libraries and learning cannot be fixed by computers, they’re too idiosyncratic. The librarian fulfills a more vital role than ever. (And might I add, for all of my looking into minute details, this is not a role for the weekend volunteer, this is a role for a paid specialist). The librarian is more vital than ever because a library offers a book many possible directions, many different legacies, some of which aren’t so pretty. Sometimes this makes things fun—it means we can still dig up the next neat thing to add to our understanding, but it’s scary also because it gives us a small idea of what we’re missing out on.

Between 1986 and 1993 the Bodleian Library Record reports that in the years leading up to an automated catalogue, the scrapbooks basically used to keep the catalogue entries of the Bodleian’s contents were failing as a system. I quote: “With no increase in staff…it was inevitable therefore that the division would eventually face a massive bottleneck….With a pasting backlog totalling over 100,000 slips the decision was taken, in June 1987, to close the guardbook catalogue and create a supplementary interim card catalogue. Instead of pasting slips into the guardbooks, slips were pasted directly onto cards and filed. A backlog which would have taken nearly two years to incorporate into the General Catalogue was thereby eliminated in a period of 12 weeks, and the resulting card catalogue made available to the public immediately. Although creating yet another catalogue to be searched by readers, it was felt that any disadvantages of the extra sequence were largely outweighed by the faster availability of the bibliographical information. With the reality of automated cataloguing on the horizon, it was anticipated that the interim catalogue too would be closed during 1988. It was understood that should funding become available, the interim card catalogue would be the first to be converted. In May 1990, through Mr Paul Hamlyn’s benefaction, one member of staff was appointed to make a start on this conversion.”

Since the last mention of Burton’s notebook was in Keissling’s 1988 bibliography, the book must have slipped through the speedy efforts of automation sometime between 1990 and the completion of the pre-1920 catalogue in 1993. Who knows what else is missing? As a matter of personal triumph the book is now searchable on Oxford’s website. But, as a mark of my personal frustration, the catalogue entry only documents that the book includes Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos. If you don’t know what else is there in advance, you don’t know what’s there at all—and that is the latest technology of many tricks of the trade that prove to be wholly destructive and wholly deserving of our attention.

Works I Read for the Longer Version Of This Paper:

Primary Sources

The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Bod 4^o E14 Art. Arlanibae, P. Arma Suecica: hoc est, Vera et accurata descriptio belli quod Gustavus Adolphus contra Ferdinandi II. exercitum in Germania hactenus gessit. 1631.

Bod 4° H 39 Th, Heydon, Sir Christopher. A defence of iudiciall astrologie, in answer to a treatise. Cambridge: 1603.

Bod 4^o L81 Art. Roberts, Henry. The most royall and honourable entertainement of … Christiern the fourth, king of Denmarke, &c. who … arriued on Thursday the 16. day of Iuly 1606. in Tylbery-Hope. London: 1606.

Bod 4° R9 Art. Ptolomaeus, Claudius. Quadripartitum iudiciorum, ab J. Sieurreo recogn. 1519.

Bod 4^o T 33 Art. Beaumont, Francis. The woman hater. London: 1607.

MS Seld supra 80

Critical Sources

Bamborough, J.B. “Robert Burton’s Astrological Notebook,” RES 22 (1981) 267-285.

Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books, Lydia G Cochrane, trans. Stanford: U of Stanford P, 1994.

Hampshire, Gwen, ed. The Bodleian Library Account Book 1613-1646. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1983.

Ker, Neil R. Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts Used as Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings, with a Survey of Oxford Binding, c. 1515-1620, Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, new series 5, 1954, 35.

Kiessling, Nicholas K. The Library of Robert Burton, Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988.

—; “Robert Burton’s Will Holograph Copy,” RES 161 (1990): 94-101.

Philip, Ian. The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford: OUP, 1983.

Roberts, R. Julian. ‘Rouse, John (1574–1652)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24177, accessed 21 March 2010]

Sherman, William H. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, Philadelphia, U of Penn Press, 2008.

Smyth, Adam. “‘Rend and teare in peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Seventeenth Century 19 (2004): 36–52.