How to plan a library building for library work — Themes and Context

s, with a carrel from one stanchell of the window to another.

This use of windows suggested to me a new convenience for research in our modern “stack,” which is described in a later chapter as the “stack carrel.”[4]

The growth of libraries slowly followed the development of monastic orders. The systematic care and use of books began with the precepts of S. Benedict in the sixth century, followed by similar rules in other brotherhoods. At the same time secular libraries and library buildings were devastated by the barbarians, while the Arabs, who developed large libraries, appeared to have housed them in mosques, so that library building science slumbered through the Dark Ages.

In the sixth and seventh centuries learning followed the first steps of Christianity into the British Isles. The earliest English “library movement” began in the monasteries of Ireland and Great Britain.

From that era onward, libraries all over Christianized Europe grew with the prosperity of religious brotherhoods. Of progress toward building, however, there is little record until the Cistercians moved theirs from the cloisters to other rooms in their monasteries, although some use of cloisters elsewhere lingered until the beginning of the seventeenth century. These rooms were at first directly over the cloisters, where alcoves first appeared, on the window side only. Still later libraries were assigned to the upper stories of separate buildings, the first put to this use since the time of the Cæsars in Rome.

These first mediæval libraries, of which several pictures are preserved, send to us the precedent of ample and aptly applied daylight admitted through long windows directly into each alcove. The exteriors remind us of our stack rooms. This arrangement of library rooms passed by imitation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the monasteries to the colleges, and still survives in the older libraries of Oxford and Cambridge,—for instance, Merton College, a long, narrow room with bookcases between the windows, at right angles with the walls, forming well-lighted alcoves.

All of the earliest library rooms were long and narrow. Clark has preserved the measurements of several thus:—

A.D. 1289. Zutphen (Holland): A solid building separated from others (in case of fire): 120 feet long, 36 feet broad: 19 uniform windows east and west, “that plenty of daylight might fall upon the desks and fill the whole length and breadth of the library.”

A.D. 1422. The Franciscan House in London, “Christ’s Hospital” (the first building in England built expressly for a library?) founded by Sir Richard Whittington; 129 feet long by 31 feet broad, with 28 desks and 28 double settles.

A.D. 1508. At Canterbury: the library over the Prior’s Chapel was 60 feet long by 20 feet broad, and had 16 bookcases, each 4 shelves high.

A.D. 1517. At Clairvaux: in the cloister are 14 studies, where the monks write and study, and over it the new library, 180 feet long by 17 wide (probably this narrowness followed the shape of the cloister) with 48 benches, “excellently lighted on both sides by large windows.”

It will be noted that these bookshelves were about four feet “on centers,” and that great emphasis was laid on ample daylight.

From the thirteenth century comes this warning for us—“the press in which books are kept ought to be lined inside with wood that the damp of the walls may not moisten or stain them,” which is singularly like a caution in a recent American manual against leaving unpainted brick walls at the back of wall cases.

It seems singular that wall shelving, which was certainly used in Assyrian libraries and in the classical period, disappears in the monkish era and yields to “presses” or closed bookcases; to appear as a new device in the library of the Escorial in Spain in the year 1583. Sir Christopher Wren thought so much of this feature that he followed it in Trinity College (Cambridge) library in 1695, saying, “The disposition of the shelves both along the walls and breaking out from the walls must prove very convenient and gracefull: A little square table in each cell with two seats.”

The fifteenth century had been a library era throughout. In the sixteenth came the Reformation, which swept away “papistical” libraries. More than eight hundred libraries of monastic orders, in England alone, were dispersed or destroyed by this iconoclastic whirlwind. In 1540 the only libraries left were at Oxford and Cambridge and in the cathedrals. But at the same time, the invention and rapid spread of printing had superseded the slow processes of making manuscript books, and had opened a new life for libraries. The first library built under these new conditions was that of St. John’s College, which brought over from the monastic and early college era the alcove arrangement.