Ancient books. Monuments of paper

A “short story of the book” through a visit to the first public library in history: the Biblioteca Angelica, in Rome. “Opening the window, he pointed his finger at the church of Nôtre-Dame (…) then with a sigh he extended his right hand toward the printed book lying open on the table, and his left hand toward Nôtre-Dame, casting a sad glance from the book to the church: “alas,” he said, “this will kill that.” (…) In printed form thought becomes more imperishable than ever; it grows volatile, invincible, indestructible. Victor Hugo, Nôtre-Dame de Paris

Text by Francesco Aquilanti (10.200 characters)
16 images by Corrado Bonora

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“Opening the window, he pointed his finger at the church of Nôtre-Dame (…) then with a sigh he extended his right hand toward the printed book lying open on the table, and his left hand toward Nôtre-Dame, casting a sad glance from the book to the church: “alas,” he said, “this will kill that.” (…) In printed form, thought becomes more imperishable than ever; it grows volatile, invincible, indestructible. Victor Hugo, Nôtre-Dame de Paris

According to both history and legend, Ptolemy I, successor to Alexander the Great, following the advice of an Athenian sage, decided to bring fame to Alexandria by founding a library. And of that library, almost a millennium and a half since its destruction, there remains in our collective imaginary the idea of a universal library, a place where all the knowledge of antiquity was preserved. There is certainly a concrete basis for this sense of universality: it is estimated that the library contained over 500,000 texts in papyrus scrolls, an immense number if you consider that, before the advent of printed books, the Papal library in Avignon contained roughly 2,000 volumes, and it was considered the largest of the entire Western world.

Angelica Library in Rome - Dante Alighieri's "Divina Commedia" - first printed edition, Foligno 1472 - Detail incipit

In Rome, during Constantine’s imperial reign, there were twenty-eight public libraries, and a private library was part of every Roman dignitary’s home.

During the darkest years of the Middle Ages, the main activity of libraries, in the obscurity of the abbeys’ copyist offices, was to produce copies and transcribe manuscripts on parchment, often in a fairly rough, approximate manner. These codices, the parchment manuscripts distributed beginning in the third- to fourth century, were very expensive as a result of the lengthy process of copying and the parchment itself, as its preparation required hundreds of sheep and goat skins for a single volume. But this exclusivity also meant that these single-copy volumes often, through the flourishing arts of miniatures and illuminations, became bona fide, unsurpassed artistic masterpieces.

Not until the Renaissance and the invention of printing would the book again become a public object, as popular and accessible as it was in the libraries of imperial Rome. Following the advent of movable type in the mid-fifteenth century, within a few short years its diffusion was incredibly widespread throughout the Western world. The books printed in the period between print’s beginning (Gutenberg’s 42-line bible, in 1456) and 1500 are called incunabula and undeniably remain some of the most beautiful books ever created, constituting the model/paradigm of typographic and formal composition that has remained essentially unchanged to this day.

Biblioteca Angelica, in Rome, 1604.

It can be said with absolute certainty that typography was the first industry in our modern understanding of the term, based on the serial production of interchangeable mechanisms and, consequently, on the standardization of production.

Between the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the great public libraries were founded with the aim of aiding study, not just the prestige of the nobles and high ecclesiastics. Thus libraries became ever more monumental, just as the knowledge transmitted through writing became ever broader.

If, on the one hand, with the advent of the printed book—that is, its serial production and stabilization and regularity of its price—there came about the absolute first system of real pricing for a good, the value of a book “handed down” has always been subject to variations of price due to its rarity, preciousness, provenance, and above all bibliophiles’ passions, generating a flourishing trade.

When in 1778 Samuel Baker joined John Sotheby to found Sotheby’s, the principal occupation of the London auctioneers was precisely that of selling books; it was Sotheby’s who first auctioned off the volumes of Napoleon and Talleyrand’s precious libraries.

Reading hall at the Vallicelliana Library, Rome

Auctions and book fairs are the essential reference points for buyers and sellers: firstly they are ever broader, more highly qualified international showcases; secondly, they are places where one is reassured by the ability to compare the historic value of the objects, and have greater certainty of the relationship between quality and price. Prestigious annual antiquarian book fairs are held around the globe: the Salon International du Livre Ancien in Paris, the Olympia Book Fair in London, the Salón del Libro Antiguo in Madrid, the Antiquarian Book Fair in New York, the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco, all the way to the Australian Antiquarian Book Fair in Sydney, to mention just a few.

The Internet, which is often blamed as a threatening competition for books, is instead an inexhaustible source of research, information, and trade for bibliophiles: it is perhaps one of the fields of collecting in which the volume of sales, so difficult to quantify, is the broadest, and ranges from small amateurs to academics all the way to major collectors and the public libraries throughout the whole world. Auction sites like eBay are a part of this “virtual” world, and in the book sector it has become the analogue of the bouquinistes, the famed book and print vendors along the Seine. It is an immense, richly varied market: from fifteenth-century incunabula to rare single issues of period magazines and comics, you have to see it to believe it! On these online auctions, just like at the flea market, it is as possible to fall prey to scams as great as the sought-after bargain. This generates an “emotional tension” that in any case is an age-old part of the collector’s world. But on the Internet there also, above all, are the catalogues of ancient/antiquarian libraries that with their contributions have truly globalised the book market: there are databases and search engines such as www.antiqbook.com, www.abebooks.com, www.bibliopoly.com, www.eurolibri.net, to name just a few, in which the catalogues of hundreds of worldwide antiquarian booksellers converge, both small and large, where it is possible to find information on tens of thousands of antique volumes for sale and even purchase them directly.

Detail of title-page of "La Prattica Vniversale in Cirurgia"(Universal Surgery Practice) by Giovanni di Vico, Venice 1685 (private collection)

But there are books of inestimable value. At Christie’s, which holds first place in auction sales, a record of $30.8 million U. S. dollars was reached in 1994 for Leonardo’s Hammer Codex, the highest price ever paid for a manuscript. But even printed books have reached the level of great artistic works at this auction house: a Japanese paid $5.39 million for what is almost certainly the last copy of Gutenberg’s 42-line bible in circulation, and in 2001 a collector laid claim to the rare first edition folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Tragedies & Histories, printed by Jaggard-Blount in 1623, for $6.17 million.

But books have many enemies as well, and are easily perishable objects. They are attacked by dust, mold, insects, and exposed to humidity and their owner’s own lack of care. In order to be well preserved, paper needs to be kept at a fixed temperature and humidity (18°–22° Celsius and 50–55 % humidity), parameters guaranteed only by the thick walls of ancient libraries or the futuristically insulated storage facilities of the most modern libraries. Above all paper inexorably ages, and the problem of this ageing lies in the quality of the paper itself. A fifteenth- or sixteenth-century book, well preserved, appears to anyone looking at it today as if it were still fresh off the press. Paper made from cotton rag was excellent, as was the best cellulose, and the glues used were wisely formulated. Present-day paper, with almost no cellulose, falls to bits after no more than thirty years. Our contemporary “monuments of paper,” which should outlast many centuries, run the risk that a century from now they will no longer physically exist. There is also the concrete threat of bookworms, who burrow fantastical tunnels from page to page, and are capable of irreparably damaging a book in just a few years.

And another question inevitably arises: will the book hold up against the challenges posed by digitization?

In its favor, the book has the advantage of being an object, and being readable anywhere—at the bar, in a train—can be carried from room to room, with no need of a “reading” device to decipher its content, and no need of electricity.

Bookworm made galleries - "La Prattica Vniversale in Cirurgia" by Giovanni di Vico, Venice 1685 (private collection)

But what, essentially, is a book? Umberto Eco, in a recent book on bibliophile, describes how memory was originally made up of stories, of a language handed down from older to younger generations: thus “a twenty-year-old could have the knowledge of someone who’d lived 5000 years.” With writing came the advent of what he calls “mineral memory,” made up of carvings and inscriptions in stone and clay, and includes even architecture and cathedrals, interpreted as the memory of a people. Even computer memory, set in silicon, according to Umberto Eco is “ mineral memory.” The third type of memory is “vegetal” memory, which, even if parchment were made of animal skins, is transcribed upon vegetal materials like papyrus and paper. This type of memory allows, for the first time, personalization, the concrete representation of the memory of whoever writes it: in front of an epigraph we don’t ask who wrote it, but in front of any book or written sheet we instinctively try to understand who wrote it and why. Because of this books continue to be the only true monument to our memory—the sole route to surpassing our individual history and enter into the memory of the world. They are a monument of paper more powerful than the cathedral of Nôtre-Dame.

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Direzione Generale per i Beni Librari e gli Istituti Culturali

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“Ancient books. Monuments of paper” by  Francesco Aquilanti and Corrado Bonora  is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Based on a work at: http://www.presseaporter.com/wp/?p=123