You Could Look It Up (54 page)

When a library holds just a few dozen books, life is simple. Need a book? The librarian can locate it for you off the top of his or her head. But books have a habit of piling up, and when those piles become too big, someone is charged with coming up with a useful list of what is where. And so was born the library catalog.

The royal library of Ashurbanipal in seventh-century-
B.C.E.
Assyria had some sort of catalog, though we know nothing of its form. Better evidence survives from the Library of Alexandria, founded in the late fourth or early third century
B.C.E.
The library had a vigorous acquisitions policy. When ships arrived in Alexandria, all their books would be seized and copied. When they were ready to depart, they were given the copies instead of the originals, which stayed at the library. Techniques like this turned the Library of Alexandria into what was, by ancient standards, a prodigiously large collection, far too large for any librarian to know by heart.
1
And so in the late third century Callimachus wrote the
Pinakes
(
Tables
or
Tablets
), the most thorough list of books in the ancient world. Callimachus divided literature into categories, including philosophy, oratory, history, law, medicine, lyric poetry, tragic poetry, and miscellaneous, and within each category he listed the authors’ names in alphabetical order—a rare classical example of alphabetical order in a reference book. The list occupied 120 “books,” or scrolls.
2
Only bits survive today, but those fragments provide a guide to other Greek literature that is now lost, presumably forever.

Callimachus had Greek and Roman successors, but after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, few impressive libraries existed in Europe. A medieval European library with five hundred books would have been exceptional. The oldest intact library in the Western world is a small room in Cesena, Italy, near Rimini, a building dating from the middle of the fifteenth century—as traditionally dated, the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of the Renaissance. There the original collection of books remains in situ: a grand total of fifty-eight volumes.
3
Most European libraries, like this one, numbered their books in the tens or hundreds of titles. The great libraries of China and the Islamic world, on the other hand, numbered theirs in the tens or hundreds of thousands, and that is where the interesting works on library cataloging are found in this period. Abu Tahir Tayfur, a ninth-century bookseller from Baghdad, followed Callimachus in giving short biographies and alphabetical lists of works of major authors. In 987, Ibn al-Nadim cataloged as many Arabic-language books as he could identify, and the resulting book, the
Fihrist
, is the most thorough collection of medieval Arabic knowledge known today.
4
And the Chinese scholar Zheng Qiao (1103–62) wrote
Jiao zhou luo
(
Theory of Library Science and Bibliography
), which gave a rationale guiding the purchase of new acquisitions.
5

The number of books and readers in the West was far lower than in the Arabic and Chinese worlds, and so the number of libraries remained lower. Early in the sixteenth century, though, movable type caused libraries to develop at an unprecedented rate. Now even the most capacious memory could not hope to recall the location of every book. And as the great libraries grew, and opened their collections not merely to the nobles who owned them but to the scholars who visited them, the need for catalogs became even greater.

Most of the impressive libraries in early modern Europe were royal collections, or the personal collections of wealthy aristocrats, and they were cataloged only sporadically. Oxford University’s Bodleian Library was first cataloged in 1605, with a four-part index covering the arts,
theology, law, and medicine, with a separate index of authors.
6
When Edward Harley—the son of the bibliophile Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer—died in 1741, his father’s collection of more than 7,000 manuscripts, 50,000 rare books, and 350,000 pamphlets was purchased by the British government, and one of the young scholars hired to produce a catalog was Samuel Johnson, who spent several years in his early thirties describing the collection.

One of the world’s greatest feats of cataloging came in the late nineteenth century, when Britain’s national library was a division of the British Museum in London. The person who made it possible was an Italian revolutionary who became the most English of establishment Englishmen. Antonio Panizzi, born in Reggio Emilia, resented Austrian rule over Italy and involved himself in revolutionary causes. According to his biographer, the political struggles were “to determine radically the course of his whole life and to influence his conduct, even into old age.”
7
Several friends were arrested for their radical politics, and eventually the inevitable happened: a warrant for Panizzi’s arrest was issued. Rather than defend himself he decided to flee. After saying goodbye to his family and close friends in 1822, he slipped across the border, using a small boat he had hidden among the reeds, and made his way through Europe with virtually no resources and no support. After arriving in England he taught himself English, gained the friendship of some powerful Whig politicians, and in 1831 landed a job at the British Museum Library, the largest in England. As he worked through the ranks at the library, he was given the task of cataloging the collection of nearly a quarter million printed books.

There had been earlier attempts. The two-volume
Librorum impressorum qui in Museo Britannico, adservantur catalogus
(
Catalog of the Printed Books Kept in the British Museum
, 1787) was followed by a seven-volume version (1813–19). Neither was very good. Plans for a more comprehensive edition resulted in the
Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum
—but only the first volume, covering
A
, saw the light of day, in 1841, before the project was abandoned.

It was Panizzi’s job to make a proper catalog. He first set his staff to work identifying exactly what they had—a more difficult task than it seems. For one reader, anything called
King Lear
on the title page is good enough. For another, only the edition that says
M. William
Shakspeare: His True Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters. With the Vnfortunate Life of Edgar, Sonne and Heire to the Earle of Gloster, and His Sullen and Assumed Humor of Tom of Bedlam
, published by Nathaniel Butter in 1608, will do. And only a serious specialist, well versed in early modern bibliography, will know that this is not the same book as the one that says on the title page that it was published by Nathaniel Butter in 1608 but was actually published by William Jaggard in 1619. Panizzi’s impatient superiors thought a printed catalog could be completed in just a few years, and they fretted when Panizzi spoke of “years of unremitting and heavy labour.” But he insisted the work had to be done right.
8

Panizzi’s real contribution was a system for organizing the records in the catalog. Most works were to be listed alphabetically by author; when that was impossible, they were to appear alphabetically under
predictable headings. To this end he compiled a set of ninety-one rules, issued in 1841. Even many librarians disparaged them. But as another librarian admitted in 1869, “The ninety-one rules, … so foolishly ridiculed for their number, have probably been increased to twice as many by the subsequent experience of that vast establishment.”
9

We assume that alphabetical order is easy, but real-world examples quickly become difficult. What to do with names in foreign alphabets? Where to alphabetize a book “By a Lady” or “By Publicus”? Should
Tom Sawyer
go under “Twain, Mark” or “Clemens, Samuel Langhorne”? “Sand, George” or “Dupin, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore”? What about authors using the names of real authors as their pseudonyms? What about nobles: alphabetize under “Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester” or “Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of”? What about a book published by the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien?
Euclid, Book V: Proved Algebraically So Far as It Relates to Commensurable Magnitudes
was published by Charles L. Dodgson, M.A., and
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll, even though they are the same person.

A few rules give a taste of Panizzi’s system:

I. Titles to be written on slips, uniform in size … .

Titles to be arranged alphabetically, according to the English alphabet only (whatever be the order of the alphabet in which a foreign name might have to be entered in its original language) under the surname of the author, whenever it appears printed in the title, or in any other part of the book. If the name be supplied in MS. the work must nevertheless be considered anonymous or pseudonymous … .

V. Works of Jewish Rabbis, as well as works of Oriental writers in general, to be entered under their first name … .

XI. Works of authors who change their name or add to it a second, after having begun to publish under the first, to be entered under the first name, noticing any alteration which may have subsequently taken place.
10

The brilliance of Panizzi’s system lies in the way it provided consistent ways of dealing with all the complications that inevitably arise once
you begin cataloging real books. Alphabetize by author: easy enough. But what about a book published, by, say, “W.S.”? Rule XXII: “Works published under initials, to be entered under the last of them; and should the librarian be able to fill up the blanks left, or complete the words which such initials are intended to represent, this is to be done in the body of the title, and all the supplied parts to be included between brackets.”
11
Rule XVIII governed long titles: “The title of the book next to be written, and that expressed in as few words and those only of the author, as may be necessary to exhibit to the reader all that the author meant to convey in the titular description of his work; the original orthography to be preserved.”
12
Rule LIV—“No work ever to be entered twice at full length. Whenever requisite, cross-references to be introduced”
13
—was especially prescient; it ensured that when changes were necessary, they would be made in just one place, not all over the catalog.

The wars between Panizzi and the trustees of the Museum dragged on, and they sometimes got ugly and personal. As the decades passed, though, Panizzi won most of his battles, and his efforts made his library one of the greatest in the world. He worked first to pass, then to enforce a new Copyright Act, ensuring that the British Museum would be a legal deposit library. Panizzi also drew up the initial plans for the legendary round Reading Room, which opened in 1857 and hosted generations of scholars—those in the know could identify the desks used by Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Mahatma Gandhi. (Since the British Library moved into its own quarters in 1997, the Reading Room has mostly been used for exhibitions, though discussions are ongoing about how best to use the space.) For this work he received a long series of honors, culminating in a knighthood in 1869. No longer Antonio Panizzi, he was now Sir Anthony, and seemingly worlds away from the radical firebrand who slipped out of his native Italy.

Panizzi died in 1879 and did not live to see the completion of his catalog, but its compilation was governed to the end by the rules he had written. The first printed version of the catalog came out between 1881 and 1900. The
General Catalogue of Printed Books
, known by the shorthand GK—the job that the trustees thought would be a simple clerical task, completed in a few years—ended up occupying 393 volumes, with another 44 in the
Supplement
added between 1900 and 1905.
14
GK2, bringing the
original up to date, covered only the early parts of the alphabet, but GK3 covered holdings through 1955, and
The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975
in 360 volumes, published between 1979 and 1987, with six supplements in the late 1980s, brought it up to date. GK now abides in the ether with 57 million items, far more than even Panizzi could have imagined: the library had just a quarter million volumes when he started, and more than half a million when he died.