Mr Chevenix's library

'It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs. Chevenix's shop, and it is the prettiest bauble you ever saw.
…..the Chevenix's have tricked it out for themselves; up two pair of stairs is what they call Mr. Chevenix's library, furnished with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any glasses. ...

….For the rest of the house, I could send it to you in this letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live till the return of the post."

Letters  Horace Walpole to Horace Mann,  June1747

Saving Wedgwood 4: the enlightened Scotsman

"We walked hence to see the Palazzo Barberini, design'd by the now Pop<e>s Architect Cavaliere Bernini, & which I take to be as superb, and princely an object, as any modern building in Europ for the quantity:
…to this is annexed a Gallery completely furnish'd <with> whatsoever Art can call rare and singular, & a Library full of worthy Collections, Medails, Marbles, and Manuscripts;"

Diary entry, Rome,  November 1644, John Evelyn, (ed. E.S. de Beer)

Among the Collections, was a Roman blue glass cameo vase,  decorated with scenes in white relief,  dating from the reign of Augustus, which (already famous for its beauty and mystery) was acquired by the Barberini family in 1627.  Over a century and a half  later in 1780 it was sold to meet gambling debts and in turn was sold on by James Byres to Sir William Hamilton in 1783.

James Byres, the dealer and intermediary, was an architect, antiquarian and scholar from Aberdeen, whose family fled to France after the Jacobite rising, then living in Rome and leading English visitors around the sights.
 "My guide was Mr. Byres, a Scottish antiquary of experience and taste.  But in the
daily labour of 18 weeks the powers of attention were sometimes fatigued."   Memoirs  Edward Gibbon

     

Temple of the Sybil in Tivoli,  etching, G.& F. Piranesi, c. 1756

Byres made a serious study of Etruscan painted tombs, on which the Adam brothers drew for their fashionable neoclassical interiors. His scholarly and philosophical interests also stretched to fossils and volcanoes, interests he shared with Sir William Hamilton, and it was the influence of Byres's pioneering work that led Wedgwood to name his new factory "Etruria".

see:  The Portland Vase  Susan Walker © Trustees of the British Museum
and www.savewedgwood.org

Three Queens' Binders

"G.D. Hobson gave the name 'Queens' Binder' to the craftsman who was thought to have bound both for Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena.  Howard M. Nixon has now taken this further and shown that three binders were involved: Queens' Binder A, Queens' Binder B and Queens' Binder C. Rather like those awful sums in old-fashioned arithmetic books, Queens' Binder A was the more prolific but ( and this will rejoice the hearts of all readers of Stephen Leacock) B was the better craftsman of the two.   Recent research suggests the Queens' Binder A may well be William Nott 'the famous bookbinder, that bound for my Lord Chancellor's library', visited by Pepys on 12 March 1668/9.  Pepys added: 'Here I did take occasion for curiosity to bespeak a book to be bound only that I might have one of his bindings.'  "

Great Books and Book Collectors   A.G. Thomas 

A Library portrait

"I sat for my picture to Mr Kneller, for Mr Pepys late Secretary of the Admiralty, holding my Sylva in my right hand:  It was upon his long and earnest request; & is placed in his Library: nor did Kneller ever paint better & more masterly work:"

Diary   John Evelyn, edited E. S. de Beer

A shadow of love

"That morning in my bunk I had read Wordsworth's great Ode in Palgrave's Golden Treasury.  Palgrave like Scott carried signs of my father's reading in the form of dog-eared pages and knowing so little about him I had followed every clue and so learned enjoy what he enjoyed.  Thus when I first entered the bank as junior clerk I had thought of it in Wordsworth's terms as a 'prison-house' -- what  was it my father had found a prison, so that he double-marked the passage?  Perhaps our home, and my stepmother and I had been the warders.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.  Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.  (I don't think there was much passionate love in Marion Crawford, and only a shadow of it in Walter Scott.)"

Travels With My Aunt  Grahame Greene

"the sincerest of flattery"

"Elizabeth thanked [Bingley] from her heart, and then walked towards a table where a few books were lying.  He immediately offered to fetch her others; all that his library afforded.

'And I wish my collection were larger for your benefit and my own credit; but I am an idle fellow, and though I have not many, I have more than I ever look into.'
Elizabth assured him that she could suit herself perfectly with those in the room.

'I am astonished,' said Miss Bingley, 'that my father should have left so small a collection of books.
--What a delightful library you have at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy!'

'It ought to be good,'  he replied, 'it has been the work of many generations.'

'And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books.'

'I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.'

'Neglect! I am sure you neglect nothing that can add to the beauties of that noble place.' "

Pride and Prejudice  Jane Austen

A reader at the Lisbon Liceu

"He had slim hands with long, finely shaped fingers, as if they had been created to turn the pages of precious old books.  With these fingers, he now leafed through Prado's book.  But he didn't read it; moving the pages was like a ritual to bring back the distant past.

'All the things he [Amadeu de Prado] had read when he entered crossed the threshold of the Liceu at the age of ten in his small, tailor-made frock coat!  Many of us caught ourselves secretly calculating whether we could keep up with him.  And then, after class, he sat in the library soaking up all the thick books, page after page,  line after line.  He had an incredible memory and an incredibly concentrated, rapt look on his face when reading.  "When Amadeu finishes reading a book," said another teacher, "it has no more letters.  He devours not only the meaning, but also the printer's ink."

'That's how it was: the books seemed to disappear inside him, leaving empty husks on the shelf afterwards'. "

Night Train to Lisbon   Pascal Mercier, trans. B. Harshaw

The Royal Library

"The King,  observing with judicious eyes
The state of both his universities,
To Oxford sent a troop of horse, and why?
That learned body wanted loyalty;
To Cambridge books, as very well discerning
How much that loyal body wanted learning."

Epigram (on George I's gift of Bishop Moore's library to Cambridge University)  Rev. Joseph Trapp

"The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse,
For Tories own no argument but force:
With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent,
For Whigs admit no force but argument."

Reply  Sir William Browne

"History has its foreground and its background"

"Contemporary English historians, it seemed, were miserably neglecting the art of narration, yet the popularity of well-written biographies showed that it was possible to combine both truth and colour.  Such books as Boswell's  life of Johnson and Southey's account of Nelson were [according to Macaulay]
 'perused with delight by the most frivolous and indolent.  Whenever any tolerable book of the same description makes its appearance, the circulating libraries are mobbed; the book societies are in commotion; the new novel lies uncut; the magazines and newspapers fill their columns with extracts.  In the meantime histories of great empires, written by men of eminent ability, lie unread on the shelves of ostentatious libraries.' "

1828: Thomas Babington Macaulay on historians, quoted in Peter Rowland's  Introduction to Macaulay's The History of England  from 1485 to 1685

My library for a horse?

What do we, as a nation, care about books?  How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

John Ruskin

A ' killer' novel

"Exclude from your library all books that have no Albany connections.  Buy only such books as were written here, planned here, written elsewhere by men who once lived here or peopled with characters who had chambers here by writers who owned no part of Albany.  With the touch of Albany as sole criterion, and still you will own a not unrepresentative collection of English literature since the end of the eighteenth century.

It began, this relationship between Albany and literature,  almost in that moment when the mansion house became what everywhere else in Britain (but never in Albany) would be called a block of flats.  And it began with a sensation which, after the fashion of sensations, has since slithered off the front page of knowledge into the graveyard of footnote obscurity.  One of the most famous of all habitués of Albany's forerunner, Melbourne House, was killed, (or was said to have been killed) by a novel.  In 1806, a clerk at the Bank of England, Thomas Surr, published a bestseller, Winter in London.  In it he caricatured the Duchess of Devonshire so successfully that when she read the book the shock of self-recognition hastened her death."

'Albany'  J.E. Morpurgo in The Book of Westminster  ed.  Ian Norrie

A young gentleman of the university

"His study has commonly handsome shelves, his books neat silk strings, which he shows to his father's man, and is loth to untie or take down  for fear of misplacing.  Upon foul days for recreation he retires thither, and looks over the pretty book his tutor reads to him, which is commonly some short history, or a piece of Euphormio;  for which his tutor gives him money to spend next day.  His main loitering is at the library, where he studies arms and books of honour, and turns a gentleman critic in pedigrees.  Of all things he endures not to be taken for a scholar, and hates a black suit, though it be of satin..."

Microscosmography  John Earle

The Library at Kovecses

"The library was so crammed that most of the panelling was hidden, and the books, in German and French and English, had overflowed in neat piles on the floor.  The surviving area of wall was filled by antlers and roebuck horns, a couple of portraits and a Rembrandt etching.  There was an enormous desk covered with photographs, a box of cigars with  cutter made out of a deer's slot and, beside them, a number of silver cigarette cases laid in a neat row, each of them embossed with a different gold monogram.  (This, I noticed later on, was an invariable item in Central European country houses, particularly in Hungary.  They were presents exchanged on special occasions, and always between men: for standing godfather, for being best man at a wedding, second in a duel, and so on.)  There were shaded lamps and leather armchairs beside a huge open stove, a basket of logs and a spaniel asleep in front of it."

A Time of Gifts  Patrick Leigh Fermor

Valedictory: The Scholar to the Ashes of his Library

"Gone the books of many names,
Eaten up by hostile flames,
Loss of all his store at once
Leaves him a senescent dunce.

Tecum habita et noris
What your freightage at threescore is.
Where is now a lifetime's reading?
Is aught left for years succeeding?
Just a few scraps often quoted,
Or a fragment vaguely noted;
All is ash and burnt-out embers
But what one poor brain remembers.
Yet he sees the friendly faces
Row on row in their set places;
Knows exactly what is in them,
Could he wake up and re-win them.
Nay; they're ghosts, and they are gone
Into charred oblivion.

Fortune of the war, old man;
Play the Stoic if you can;
In the breast the heart be hid
Of the Second Aeneid,
Known and conned too many years
Not to transubstantiate tears.
'Studies into manners pass' --
So the sage's saying was.
Studies are for virtue's sake;
Be the man that they should make."

Charles Brodribb     Lincoln's Inn, October 1940
From The Book of The City,  editor Ian Norrie