A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Read online

  Barely a fortnight before his death on May 31, 1703, Pepys specified the future of his library in two codicils to his will. A widower for thirty-four years with no children of his own, Pepys directed that his sister’s son John Jackson be given “full and sole possession of all my collection of books and papers,” and that the young man enjoy full use of the library for the “terme of his natural Life.” He further stipulated that “all possible provision should be made” to assure “unalterable preservation and perpetual security” of his wishes, and that upon his nephew’s death, the library should “be placed and for ever settled in one of our universities and rather in that of Cambridge than Oxford.”

  Pepys was inclined to see the library placed in the “new building” he had helped finance at his alma mater, Magdalene College, in the 1660s, but he also mentioned Trinity College as an alternative. He insisted that the library remain “in its present form” with no “other books mixt therewith.” To ensure that this would be the case, he proposed a further security arrangement that would require the two colleges to conduct “a reciprocal check upon one another.” Whichever institution accepted the books would have to allow annual visitations from its counterpart, and if “any breach” in “said covenants” were discovered, the library would go over to the other school immediately. Trinity has not exercised its right of inspection within the last century, but there has been no need; the terms have been observed for more than 265 years.

  Inscribed above a central arch on the west façade of the stone building are the words “Bibliotheca Pepysiana,” and in smaller letters is the collector’s motto: “Mens cujusque is est quisque.” As he was showing me through the library one Saturday morning during Easter break, Richard Luckett, the Pepys librarian, offered his translation of the phrase. “It is a quotation from Cicero,” he said. “It is very contracted Latin, but what it means essentially is, ‘The mind of each, that is what each man is.’ What that says, I believe, is that this is not Mr. Pepys”—he pointed to a familiar portrait of the diarist that hangs between Presses 2 and 3—“but this is”—and he pointed to a book. “And this,” he quickly added, indicating another, “and this, and this, and this.”

  A heady aroma of waxed leather bindings, old printed paper, and strips of cedar that line the inside of the bookcases pervades the Pepys Library, making the experience of a visit there pleasant for all the senses. Entry to the fireproof room is possible only through two steel doors, each connected to a formidable security system. “We do not admit casual readers,” Luckett explained. “A lot of my job involves screening the queries.” A historic criticism of the library, in fact, has been the rigid standards of access imposed by the college, prompting William Blades in his sprightly 1880 work, The Enemies of Books, to include among his villains “those bibliomaniacs and overcareful possessors, who, being unable to carry their treasures into the next world, do all they can to hinder the usefulness in this.” Blades specifically cited “the curious library of old Samuel Pepys, the well-known diarist” as his prime example. But others have expressed a different opinion; one such is Henry B. Wheatley, who wrote in 1899, the “interest of this room is unique, and no one who has been privileged to enter this quiet retreat can ever forget his visit to the Pepysian Library.”

  Toward the end of his life, Pepys prepared a memorandum that outlined his concept of collecting. He wrote that a private library should comprehend, “in fewest books in least room,” the greatest diversity of subjects, styles, and languages that “its owner’s reading will bear.” With that statement, according to Luckett, Pepys was trying to “formulate exactly what his library was,” and to do that he had to be clear about what it was not. “It was not a public library in a university, it was not the library of a professor, nothing like that. It was a private library.” It is partly for this reason, Luckett believes, that Pepys wanted nothing added to his collection. “Requiring no subtraction is not unusual. But I know of no other major library which has not been supplemented with something new at some point. This one is kept exactly as it was.”

  There were to be three thousand books in the collection, not a volume more, not a volume less, because Pepys had determined this number to be ideal for a gentleman’s library. There were times during the forty years of his active collecting when books were discarded to make room for new titles, which explains why volumes with the distinctive Pepys bookplate showing his motto above a pair of crossed anchors turn up in antiquarian catalogues every so often. The shelving system is by size, so that tiny books barely a few inches high are on Shelf 1 and bulky folios are on Shelf 5. The largest volumes of all are arranged around the sides of the diarist’s desk, which is in effect the twelfth and final bookcase. Volumes are numbered 1 to 3,000, from the smallest to the largest. So that they would appear of uniform size, Pepys installed a series of graded wooden stilts beneath smaller books, and each stilt was decorated appropriately to match the bindings. The first codicil to his will further mandates that book placement “as to heighth be strictly reviewed,” and where found “requiring it,” to be “more nicely adjusted.”

  Pepys’s comportment in life exhibited similar neatness and exactitude. “There is where the diary lives,” Luckett said, pausing at Press 1. “It is not hidden; as you can see it is right there behind the glass.” He gently removed the first volume from the third shelf and passed it carefully over to me. “You will notice, of course, that he didn’t just start in 1660, but on January 1, 1660.” Though written in shorthand, the characters are precise, tidy, finely formed, and, like the fastidiously conceived shelves of his bookcases, “nicely adjusted.”

  When he began the journal, Pepys, the son of a tailor, was a twenty-six-year- old steward and man of business to Edward Montagu, the lord admiral, who was a distant cousin of his but came from a totally different social sphere. In May of 1660 he sailed with the fleet to bring Charles II back from exile in Holland. The accounts Pepys wrote of these crucial months leading up to the coronation on April 23, 1661, are without equal for the period. Meanwhile, he continued his impressive advancement within the government to become clerk of the acts to the Navy Board, a civilian office responsible for designing, building, and repairing ships of the line, managing dockyards, supplying the fleet with victuals, and providing supplies and equipment. In time he would serve Charles II and James II as secretary to the Admiralty, and the same love of order so evident in his private life helped make him a superior civil servant. Had he never kept a diary or formed a library, he would still be remembered as the individual most responsible for creating the naval force Lord Nelson would direct to victory at Trafalgar in 1805. Socially, Pepys had an impressive circle of friends that included another great diarist of the period, John Evelyn. Pepys devoted time to his love of music, theater, and female companionship, and every night before retiring, he recorded by flickering candlelight the events of the day in his diary.

  On July 23, 1666, Pepys brought over to his London apartment a master joiner from the Deptford and Woolwich dockyards named Thomas Sympson, and together “with great pains” they set about “contriving presses to put my books up in; they now growing numerous and lying one upon another on my chairs, I lose the use, to avoid the trouble of removing them when I would open a book.” The press Sympson built to Pepys’s exacting specifications was of gorgeous carved oak and fitted with facing doors inlaid with small rectangles of glass, believed to be the first glazed bookcase ever crafted. Sympson returned the following month “to set up my other new presse for my books.”

  Luckett noted that iron handles were fastened on the earlier presses, brass on the last ones. “The bookcases come apart and these are carrying handles. In fact this is how they were all brought up from London in 1724. There are other subtle differences as well. Number One has adjustable shelves, whereas Number Twelve has never been adjustable; those shelves are fixed. What that suggests is that Pepys started with a practical domestic bookcase, one in which he could adjust the shelves. Eventually he saw that in o
rder to get the maximum number of books into the smallest place, he would arrange them by height.”

  Pepys’s book presses are notable also for the intricate carvings that appear on the cornices at the top and the plinths at the bottom. “It’s very much like the carvings you have on the stern galleries of ships,” Luckett said. “The choice of wood is consistent with this as well. Walnut would have been more fashionable for furniture at the time, but oak was the wood that you got in dockyards. I believe this to be the most considered library that has ever come from one man.”

  Because book placement was determined by size, not content, Pepys devised a detailed scheme to help him locate specific works. Two catalogues, one listing titles by number, the other by alphabet, are supplemented by a subject index called “Appendix Classica” that is keyed to a chart that pinpoints press and shelf locations. The constant addition of new books mandated the periodic reordering of placement, a process Pepys called an “adjustment” that provides other useful information about acquisitions. “You can roughly determine how long a book has been in the collection by how many different shelf numbers it has had,” Luckett said.

  Today Pepys would be considered a connoisseur, though the concept used three centuries ago to describe him would have been virtuoso—an experimenter or investigator. He collected contemporary books widely, including popular romances he called “vulgaria,” but he also sought out medieval manuscripts, early printed books, and material dealing with seafaring in general and the Royal Navy in particular, as well as a wide variety of special interests that intrigued him, such as music, chess, magic, science, and herbal cures. Since Pepys sent his books out to be bound, his library is the finest collection of seventeenth-century English bindings in existence.

  The Pepys Library includes among two hundred early books printed up to 1558 seven titles produced by William Caxton, eight by Wynkyn de Worde, and eight by Richard Pynson. Of the incunabula, twenty-five in the collection are considered unique, among them Caxton’s Reynard the Fox. The library also has the only known copy of Stephen Hawes’s The Example of Virtue, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510. The library’s copy of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is particularly interesting because Pepys’s name appears on the imprimatur as president of the Royal Society, which sponsored the work in 1687. The only book Pepys himself wrote and saw through the press, Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy, printed in 1690, is present in a large paper copy. Early editions of Racine, Molière, Pascal, and Descartes are represented as well.

  An especially striking item is an illustrated armament roll of Henry VIII’s navy that contains the only known contemporary drawing of the Mary Rose, a huge ship of the line that sank off Portsmouth in 1545; recently salvaged, the vessel is on display in Portsmouth. Presented to Pepys by Charles II, the roll was prepared in 1546 by Anthony Anthony, an officer of ordnance. Pepys cut up the roll ship by ship, mounted the individual drawings on vellum, and had them bound in an ornate volume. Another significant item is the victualer’s book of the Spanish Armada, which lists every ship that sailed for England in 1588 and itemizes its stores. Pepys also acquired a nautical almanac that bears the ownership signature of Sir Francis Drake.

  In addition to the books and manuscripts are some 10,500 prints contained in a score of large albums, including remarkable specimens by Rembrandt and Dürer. Some 1,750 broadsheet ballads are pasted in five large albums, and about 850 of these can be found nowhere else. There also is an enormous archive of maps and nautical charts and a collection of ephemera that includes chapbooks sold at fairs by vendors for the popular market.

  On May 31, 1669, Pepys began the final paragraph of the concluding volume of his diary with the frightening admission that he was going blind: “I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journall, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand.” Even though Pepys regained his sight and lived another thirty-four years, his nightly musings were done. For modern critics, the journal has a finished literary quality to it, a work that begins dramatically, proceeds forcefully, and concludes poignantly. As a social document, the diary provides as remarkable a window into the daily life of Restoration England as George Thomason’s tracts do for the turbulent era that immediately preceded it. “None of Pepys’s other personal papers are here,” Luckett said. “Most of them ended up in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But the diary was quite deliberately placed in his library, and was regarded as a book rather than a private document for a long, long time.”

  Pepys never lost his enthusiasm for books, and he drew on many sources to satisfy his hunger, including auctions, which became popular in England during his peak years of acquisition. The Leiden publishing house of Elzevier, founded in about 1580, is credited with holding Europe’s first book auction in 1604; this clever innovation reached England in 1676, seven years after Pepys made his final journal entry. About a hundred such sales were held in Great Britain from 1676 to 1700, dispersing 350,000 titles and realizing £250,000. Whether Pepys attended the first London sale is not known, though he did buy at others. In his diary, John Evelyn deplored how this “epidemical” form of library disposal had become so rampant, and he expressed hope that Pepys had taken steps to “secure” his books “from the sad dispersions many noble libraries and cabinets have suffered in these later times,” especially in light of the “cost and industry” his good friend had invested in them.

  Joseph Addison took caustic aim at this curiously popular form of book exchange in an essay he wrote on April 13, 1710, for The Tatler about a “learned idiot” he called Tom Folio: “There is not a sale of books begins until Tom Folio is seen at the door. There is not an auction where his name is not heard, and that too in the very nick of time, in the critical moment, before the last decisive stroke of the hammer. There is not a subscription goes forward in which Tom is not privy to the first rough draught of the proposals; nor a catalogue printed, that doth not come to him wet from the press. He is a universal scholar, so far as the title page of all authors: he knows the manuscripts in which they were discovered, the editions through which they have passed, with the praises or censures which they have received from the several members of the learned world.”

  Though Magdalene College has been doggedly faithful to Pepys’s wishes, there has been a single modification to the library. By making explicitly clear that the “new” item is not a formal addition to the library, but simply displayed there on long-term loan from its actual owner, officials feel they have not violated the diarist’s will. “What is important to grasp is our conviction that Pepys undoubtedly would approve,” Luckett said, and it is a story that illustrates as well as any other the cross-currents of collecting through the centuries.

  On March 12, 1688, Pepys acquired at a London auction the manuscript copy of William Caxton’s translation of Books 10–15 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it always has been a valued component of the library. Scholars had believed for centuries that Books 1–9 either were lost or never existed, but in 1965 the missing document was discovered lying buried among the “residue” of material left by the book collector Sir Thomas Phillipps at his death in 1872. The manuscript was bought for $252,000 at a Sotheby’s auction by the New York dealer Lew David Feldman in 1966, but the prospect of the 272-page document leaving Great Britain ignited a spirited controversy, which was averted only when Eugene Power of Ann Arbor, Michigan, bought the book from Feldman and presented it to Magdalene College. “It was always assumed that the part Pepys had acquired was the only one that survived, so in this, we are certain, he would have approved,” Luckett said. After many centuries of separation, the two parts are now kept together in a display case apart from the twelve presses. “My delight is in the neatness of everything,” Pepys had boasted, and with this satisfying denouement, it is hard to imagine the old virtuoso calling out from his grave for inspectors to investigate reports that covenants had be
en breached at Magdalene College.

  Pepys also had an abiding wish to document all forms of calligraphy. “He was engaged in a scientific study of writing,” Luckett said. “He wanted to get an example of every known script over a thousand-year period. It was an exploration, and as such it was the first attempt to put handwriting into chronological order.” The fragments he gathered and pasted into three albums were turned over to a young paleographer named Humfrey Wanley, who wrote a learned commentary for each of the calligraphic illustrations that had been assembled.

  In 1715, twelve years after Pepys died, the bookman Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726) began keeping a diary of his own. Its purpose was not to set down insightful commentary on the events of the day, but to record his professional activities as librarian, cataloguer, and chief book scout for Robert Harley, the first earl of Oxford, an influential politician who achieved great power during the reign of Queen Anne and was set on acquiring the papers and books of important figures. Harley did not himself collect; he generally commissioned others to do so on his behalf. When it became apparent that he needed assistance, the most qualified person in the realm was Humfrey Wanley, and his diary is as important a record on the growth of British book collecting as is the Philobiblon of more than 250 years earlier.

  Wanley exhibited an early interest in old books and manuscripts. He became involved in the Pepys project while engaged as an assistant librarian at the Bodleian Library from 1695 to 1700 and assumed numerous other assignments of lasting significance. The catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts that Wanley prepared for the scholar George Hickes in 1701 earned him a personal recommendation to Robert Harley. He was described as having “the best skill in ancient hands and MSS of any man not only of this, but, I believe, of any former age, and I wish for the sake of the public, that he might meet with the same encouragement here, that he would have met in France, Holland, or Sweden, had he been born in any of those countries.”