The Library of One’s Dreams

painting by Carl Spitzweg

What do you think the perfect library would be like -- the library of your dreams?  For most book-lovers, I might guess, such a library would have books in great quantity.  But how should such a large number of books be stored?  That desire for numerous volumes has made many a book-lover yearn to have floor-to-ceiling wood shelves.  However, such shelves present the difficulty of browsing while perched precariously atop a ladder, well captured in the 1850 painting "Der Bücherwurm" ("The Bookworm").  

Thinking about myself alone, I would like any library I enter to contain both books on the subject I'm searching for and other books that might catch my eye, leading me to new discoveries or interests. However, if that were all a library held, it would be catering to my needs alone.  What about other people's needs?  A good public library would keep me from becoming selfish.  It would contain books I would never want to read so that it would continue to attract other people as well.

Without a doubt, the library most often declared to have been "the greatest" library of all times has been the ancient Library of Alexandria.  So hyped has been that library that it is said that it grew in size even after it no longer existed -- its supposed size enlarged with each new telling about its dream-like grandeur.  There are several legends about its supposed "destruction."  Take your pick whether you want the culprit to be Caesar, ancient Christians, or the Muslims.  Nevertheless, most historians join with Ian McNeely, who explains that most probably that library “decayed as the result of neglect” by political rulers, leaving “no one left to tend and preserve it.”

Before we get too dreamy about the "perfect" library, we might remember that some of our dreams at night are actually nightmares.  Similarly, some libraries been the stuff of bad dreams.  In 1575, when the scholar Hugo Blotius went to Vienna to take charge of Emperor Maximilian II's library, he discovered, in his words:

There was mould and rot everywhere, the debris of moths
 and bookworms, and a thick covering of cobwebs.

Roughly two centuries later, as part of an "Enlightenment" wave to purge religious influences upon society, books from a Jesuit college in Brussels were claimed for a royal collection.  Not yet having space to hold them, the royal library resorted to storing them in a church -- where there were mice!  So, as a pair of today's historians explain:

The secretary of the local literary society ... duly made a selection of 'useful books' which he placed on the shelves in the middle of the nave, and the remainder were strewn on the floor, so as to distract the mice with easily accessible food.

It thus seems that many forms of life are not that kind toward books.  Nor is inanimate Nature always that friendly towards book collections.  The San Francisco earthquake of 1989 spilled half-a-million books in its public library onto the floor, damaging many of them.

Humans' ability to learn to speak a language is a natural product of evolution; it is part of our brains' having evolved especially for that purpose.  But writing and reading do not come to us automatically or naturally (a fact those with dyslexia well know).  It might be said, therefore, that libraries are in a certain sense also "unnatural."  They are accomplishments of developed human culture.

Nevertheless, Nature (in forms other than mould, moths, spiders, and mice) cannot be kept entirely outside the walls of our libraries.  The pages of almost all books have been made from animal skins (i.e., parchment) or tree pulp (i.e., most paper).  The English word "book" is even derived from the word "beech," as in beech trees.

Moreover, what would a library's interior be without natural light to complement that which is artificially made?  And studying in a library would be oppressive if a person could not occasionally gaze out a window at grass, tree, clouds, or sky, thus resting their eye muscles and expanding their mind further than the book alone could do.

~ ~ ~ 

Do you have any favorite memories about libraries?

(The explanation about the Library of Alexandria by Ian F. McNeely is from
 his Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet, © 2008, p. 35.)
(The other quotations are from The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree
 and Arthur der Weduwen, © 2021, pp.1 & 233.)