It was a mere 402 years ago today, in 1602, that the Bodleian Library at Oxford University was opened to the public. It wasn’t a step the librarians took lightly. The library had been founded nearly as far in its past as 1602 is in our past, in the 1300s, and for its first three centuries it was definitely not open to the public. Not that the public back then had much use for libraries; most of the relatively few people who knew how to read were probably associated with Oxford anyway.
It wasn’t originally called the Bodleian Library. Sir Thomas Bodley didn’t enter the picture until 1598. He was an academic who came into a lot of money when he married Ann Carew, a rich widow. He had been a fellow at Merton, one of the colleges of Oxford, but you couldn’t have that position if you were married, so he resigned. Then he decided to use some of his new-found fortune to restore an old library that had been neglected for years. At the time it was known as Duke Humfrey’s Library.
A “library” isn’t necessarily a building, and sure enough, Duke Humfrey’s Library was just a room. It’s still there, by the way, one of the reading rooms in the Bodleian Library, and it’s still known as Duke Humfrey’s Library. For a long time it was reserved for people who wanted to read any of the library’s collection of books from the 1600s or earlier — that is, some of the books that were in Duke Humfrey’s Library long before it got renamed.
Thomas Bodley had been a scholar of Ancient Greek, but when he got rich and (technically) left the University, he spent most of his time on the library. In the early 1600s, being rich meant (at least for Bodley) that collecting books was an option. Books were expensive luxury items. Bodley was even able to acquire some books from China. That was an optimistic undertaking since there was nobody at Oxford — and maybe nobody in all of England — who could read Chinese at the time. There were plenty of books in Latin and Greek, of course, but very few in English. In the first decades of the 1600s almost all books were academic works, and hardly anybody bothered to do any scholarly work in that commoners’ language called English.
Things were slowly changing though, and reading was becoming more common. Possibly Bodley’s biggest idea (really it was Thomas James, the librarian of the Bodleian, who suggested it) was to convince the Stationer’s Company to donate to the library a copy of every book they printed. Since that company had a monopoly on publishing in England, that meant the library got a copy of every new book. Although the UK now has plenty of publishers, the Bodleian still receives a copy of every book.
The library grew pretty quickly. When it began, its entire collection fit in one room (originally it fit in a single cabinet, which the books were chained to). But by 1620, they had over 16,000 items. There was only one way to find anything; the catalog. But there was a catch; if you wanted to use the catalog you had to buy your own copy. It cost 2 shillings 8 pence, which (I think) was a fairly hefty price back then.
By the 1700s the Bodleian’s collection was enormous. Besides getting a copy of every published book, the place was famous enough that it was common practice for the wealthy to bequeath their personal libraries to the Bodleian. It was essentially England’s national library. New additions had to be added regularly just to have someplace to put all the books. The British Museum opened in 1753 and became the “official” national library, but the Bodleian kept growing.
Long before it got its current name, the library had a couple of periods during which it didn’t grow at all — in fact it shrank. One of those was during the mid-1500s when Edward VI was the king; all the “superstitious” books were removed from the library. All they meant by “superstitious” was any book somehow related to Catholicism. Edward was the first monarch to be raised as a Protestant, and it’s possible that in his youthful zeal he overreached a bit. He was just a kid at the time, after all — he died of an illness when he was just 15. When his sister Mary became queen, she repealed most of his Protestant edicts, but it was too late for the library books.
Something similarly language-related happened (not to the Bodleian) on November 8 in 1901; there were riots in Athens so extreme that 8 people were killed. The cause? Part of the Christian bible had been translated into modern Greek. The Greek Orthodox Church was dead-set against modern Greek, claiming that the ancient version was the only “pure” form of the language. Practically as bad as English back a few centuries! Ancient Greek was also much less comprehensible; Greek has evolved so much over the millennia that knowing one version doesn’t help you at all understand the other. Something like Old English versus modern English.
That particular outrage has died down by now, and you can find plenty of books in modern Greek, including the bible. What’s still not as easy is finding a place where you can learn either version of Greek. It’s not a very common language, and you’d probably have to find a college that teaches it. In the US, you could select Mount Holyoke College, which you might pick because today is the anniversary of its founding in 1837.
Mount Holyoke was founded by Mary Lyon, who advocated careers for women, particularly in teaching. She was pretty fierce about it, and required every student in her college to work (even if their families had cash) as well as exercise for 45 minutes after breakfast. They had to take their exercise in unheated hallways, too. It wasn’t all that different from the conditions in the novel The Little Female Academy, written by Sarah Fielding in 1749. It was (probably) the first novel, at least in English, written for children. Fielding, by the way, was born on November 8, 1710, and since she was English, copies of her books were forwarded to the Bodleian Library as soon as they were published.
Along the way, the same arrangement was made with Irish publishers. So when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, a copy of that went to the Bodleian too. It’s not clear whether Stoker was aware that he shared his birthday with Sarah Fielding. But he definitely wasn’t aware of Margaret Mitchell, because by the time he passed away in 1912, Mitchell was still years away from writing her one and only book, Gone with the Wind. Mitchell, of course, was also born on November 8, and since she and her novel were American, the Bodleian might not have received a copy until a British edition was printed.
British and American editions of the same book often look different. The covers might have different art work, and even the typefaces inside might not be the same. One might be set in the Palatino font, for example, and the other in Optima. But even those typefaces have something in common: they were both designed by Hermann Zapf, who also celebrated his birthday on November 8.
Zapf was one of the first designers to take computer-based typesetting seriously, and started working with computers in the 1960s. He designed some of the digital fonts that are still the most popular. They’re well represented in the Bodleian too, which went digital in 2015. Now its collection includes more than books, since “digital” also includes things like the latest HBO videos. And since we’re talking about HBO, its birthday is November 8 too; it was first launched all the way back in 1972.
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