On Open Libraries

November 18, 2021 timothywstanley@me.com

In 1598, the University of Oxford received an extraordinary proposal. Sir Thomas Bodley, a retired diplomat and Oxford alumnus, offered to restore the dilapidated university library, entirely at his own cost... The convulsions of the sixteenth century left a lasting impression. In 1605, Francis Bacon thanked Bodley for building 'an ark to save learning from the deluge.' Scholars on the continent, Catholic and Protestant, felt similarly, and by around 1600, universities, new and old, began to acquire libraries. Yet the purpose of these institutional libraries, what books would be in them, and, crucially, who would pay for them, were contentious issues, in many cases inadequately resolved... Thomas Bodley was without doubt a visionary. A child of exile during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, he had seen many scholars scattered to the winds, their libraries confiscated or abandoned in their haste to depart. He enjoyed a superb education in Geneva and Oxford that had instilled in him the value of books, but he also understood that libraries could not survive if one did not plan for their future, so that the initial enthusiasm did not die with its founder. Bodley, it seemed, had learned the lessons from the failures of earlier collectors: he ensured that his library would be provided with a substantial endowment, of land and property rents, to acquire books. This was key if the library was to remain supplied with the latest scholarly publications; he was rightly convinced that it was the absence of this provision that had caused so many ambitious library projects to atrophy... Bodley was adamant in his instructions that the library should never be closed, and this too was followed to the letter.

- https://lithub.com/before-oxfords-library-was-the-finest-institutional-library-in-europe-it-was-kind-of-a-dump/. This is an excerpt from The Library: A Fragile History, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur de Weduwen (2021).