Memory-Witness-Use: Books and the Circulation of Learning1

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 33, 1 January 2000, Page 11

Memory-Witness-Use: Books and the Circulation of Learning 1

Mark Bland

‘Quas natura negat, praebuit arte vias’: Claudian

Language, the poet Ben Jonson wrote, ‘most shows a man: speak that I may see thee’. 2 To see language is to read it; but to read speech is, as it were, to see through the appearance of things, to read a life as you would a manuscript or book. The image is a common one. ‘The world is a book’, remarked the essayist Sir William Cornwallis, ‘the actions of men commentaries upon that volumeV Similarly Hotspur, as his widow remarks, was the ‘copy and book, that fashioned others’. 4 A copy, in this sense, is the first recension of a text, not quite the original but something immediately derived from it a record of the spoken word or something first shaped in the memory and then written down; or else, a manuscript prepared from a collection of papers that might vary in tidiness and completeness from a schematic outline of notes to a cleanly written text, or a heavily revised draft. Hotspur’s book is, therefore, a manuscript, a one-off, though it will also be copied, transcribed or printed by others (and, on occasion, as Henry Olney remarked ‘fowly corrupted’), 5 and his text, his life, will enter into circulation, will be read, imitated, and spoken about. As a book, it will become something from which others will take notes, make a precis or digest of, perhaps write essays or books upon and which others (Shakespeare, for instance) will turn back into speech, performance, and spectacle; infusing the presence of the word with gesture, action, and meaning. For the life of the word, the way in which it is enacted and shaped in the hand, is the thing that the book is, and to which the book

bears witness. The presence of the book, of Hotspur’s book, and the memory of the text that it represents also implies the record of an action. Yet to act is both to act and to imitate; and in that repetition, we cannot be a perfect witness to the words of someone else. The copy as such can never be the original; and so, instead, we collect the history of these readings. As Michel de Certeau remarked:

Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost paradise. 6

Hence, the reason why libraries exist.

If Jonson’s larger point, which was also that of Plato in the Phaedrus, is that ‘the living word of knowledge which has a soul’ is the product not simply of the word (or the text as information) but human understanding, 7 he sees that access to the word through documents, and the prerogative (one might say the obligation) to engage with the purpose and failings of a text or an idea, as being the principal responsibility of a civilised society. Or, to put this in a more immediate and present way, the library (like the university) exists not only to preserve, but also to remedy knowledge. The one ensures the preservation of, and access to, the documentary record for the purposes of research, the other engages our understanding through the processes of writing and speech.

As a society, even one as technologically complex as we have now become, we remain quite dependent on speech as the primary mechanism for the expression of ideas. Indeed, as Pliny observed long ago:

We are always being told that the spoken word is much more effective; however well a piece of writing makes its point, anything which is driven into the mind by the delivery and expression, the appearance and gestures of a speaker remains deeply implanted there. 8

We do not know whether speech is natural to human existence, but we do know that all human societies have learnt to speak. Speech is the most ancient, the most subtle, and the most immediate use of language: for when we speak, instinctively we inflect words with irony, faith, anger, sadness, or need, with affection, regret, boredom, hope, or joy. A single word may capture a myriad of contexts; and, when it comes to important concerns, we expect those with whom we deal to speak plainly and well, distrusting evasion, loquacity and imprecision ‘that glib and oily art, to speak and purpose not’. 9 Sometimes, a phrase or a sentence (once spoken) may be sufficient to define the ethos of a civilisation and to be held in common memory: ‘These things we hold to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. . .’. In the beginning was the word.

Speech is at once both robust and fragile, and it has its own library in the human memory. It is the common currency of our lives, and yet it perishes in a breath. When we remember the past, it is often in complex ways: the timbre and inflexion of a voice, the gestures of the person, or their manner, are melded together just as, sometimes, they are recalled through mimesis, or imitation. Yet the mind is also a creative archive: always there, always used, always accessioning new material, resourcing its contents, and exhibiting some of the significant holdings in its collections. Sometimes we misplace a volume, maybe even an entire shelf, but the human mind, for all our propensity to re-create the past, is the librarian of our lives.

It is only in very recent times that we have found a way to record and preserve the human voice (hence, also, the oral history archive), and to transmit it at a distance. Yet, for all of our uses of communication, of documents and texts, for all of what libraries preserve as a witness to a society and its civilisation, much of what we do and think is lost to posterity. For all its triumph, in manuscript, in print, and through electronic and recorded resources, the written testament is but a fragment of that larger lost work of the living word.

Libraries are about fragments. 10 Their first lesson, the law of the catalogue, is that no literary document exists in isolation. This is as true of the most simple as the most erudite of witnesses. What we do with these fragments is discover the relationships that exist between them, and from that discovery we construct a pattern of understanding: when we write something down, we distance ourselves from its meaning, and conceive of it as relating to something else. As soon as we understand that all texts have con-texts other words, other ideas, against which they exist we enter into a far more fruitful and complex understanding of the human record. On a higher level, we also discover that all libraries are incomplete, and that each library has its own particular role as a witness to civilisation.

The point is important because writing and reading are not natural to the human condition, but rather are skills that are and have been learnt. The invention of writing, the first attempt to create a commonly recognised set of symbols that served a linguistic purpose in a world where nothing of its kind existed, was a truly extraordinary feat of the human intellect and imagination. The idea of what writing might be, why it might be needed, and how it might be performed, are not obvious. Such a realisation has only happened at most four times in the history of human civilisation: amongst the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Indians, and the Chinese."

Writing would appear to have first developed as a form of record amongst the Sumerians around 3400 bc, its earliest uses being administrative. Literary works apparently were transcribed rather later, and occurred first around 2600 bc. By 2000 bc, we have evidence of the first major epic narratives in the Gilgamesh cycle. Unlike the hieroglyph and hieratic script of Egypt, the form of writing on clay tablet amongst the West Asiatic communities is known as cuneiform. There are a number of important sites that bear witness to the creation of libraries and archives

amongst these societies (Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian), the most famous of which was the library of Sennucherib and Assurbanipal at Nineveh in the Bth century bc. 12

Appropriately, the earliest literary documents in the Turnbull Library (donated to the Library in 1956) are four cuneiform tablets, the oldest three of which are Sumerian and date from ca 2500-2100 bc (Figure 1). One tablet records three deliveries of leather bags to the palace, another concerns the hiring of a boat and its crew to carry reeds upstream from Umma to Nippur, a distance of some 50 miles. The third tablet has not been deciphered. It is, perhaps, their ordinariness, as much as their antiquity, that is so compelling a humbling reminder that so much of what we do perishes, and that the past, especially the survival of what is deemed unimportant, always teeters on the edge of oblivion, leaving what remains to seem almost miraculous. 13

At much the same time as the Sumerians developed writing, so too did the Egyptians. It was the Egyptians who developed a complex ideology of the dead and who, by 3100 bc, used writing within the tomb to present the dead to the world to come, as well as externally to ensure the survival of the dead through offerings. 14 These two functions of writing, administrative and sacred, do not depend on the establishment of a chronological sequence as such, but rather an understanding of relationships within time, personal and material. In particular, the act of naming the

dead involves, beyond time, a kind of immortality: one closely linked with the purpose in oral traditions of the memorialised genealogy.

The history of writing amongst the Greeks seems to have developed through two distinct stages. The realisation by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick that the language of Mycenaean Linear B was Greek led, famously, to its decipherment in the early 19505, though Minoan Linear A still eludes (at least, in part) our understanding. 16 This early form of Greek script then disappeared around 1100 bc, to be replaced with the archaic Greek alphabet by the early Bth century bc. (Quite what happened in between is a matter of some question, though what is clear is that the second writing system was very different from the first.)

What significantly differentiated ancient Greek script from its predecessors was its simplicity and the use of letters to record vowel sounds. 16 With ancient Greek we have the beginning of a writing system that we commonly recognise, and to which we can relate methods of record more clearly than cuneiform and hieroglyphics. What does need to be emphasised, however, is that ancient Greece remained a predominantly oral society, and that the development of the use of the written record was neither as obvious nor as consistent as we might now assume. 17

The earliest Greek texts were scratched on clay shards or cut into stone and, apart from graffiti, are most closely linked with certain kinds of ritual including the naming of the dead. Writing was also used for curses, sometimes in combination with legal or moral injunctions: a kind of social regulation and instigation to probity that attempted to prevent inappropriate conduct by threatening divine retribution similar, in its way, to saying ‘may any librarian who sells a book from these shelves be struck from the Book of Life’.

The evidence for the emergence of writing during the classical age is a reminder of just how fragmentary the witnesses that survive from the past are. The attempt to piece together those fragments and reconstruct the ancient world was, of course, the overriding pre-occupation of early modem scholarship. That is a subject to which we will shortly turn; but, for the moment, the way in which writing is implicated in the transformation of social and cultural practices requires comment.

We have become habituated to the practice of writing, of course, and there has long been a tradition of books that teach such skills, but perhaps the most suggestive, if only because of the immediacy of its title for present purposes, is Jacopo Publicio’s Artes orandi, epistolandi, memorandi (Venice, 1482 and 1485; both editions in the Turnbull Library), ‘The arts of speech, writing and memory’. The volume contains a number of important illustrations including an early description of chess, as well as a number of ways of remembering letter keys through symbols. What needs to be emphasised for now is this last component, the art of memory, for its relationship to speech and writing is not a simple one.

There have been societies for whom the idea of a written record did not exist pre-contact Maori culture, for instance and these societies have relied, therefore,

on memory and oral tradition as a witness to the past. For such societies, the uses of memory, and the patterns of thought and speech, have been significant elements of their civilisation, as they have continued to be even after the impact, one might say after the imposition, of literacy.

Writing is not superior to speech as such, except that it does enable the formation of complex societies with forms of record and the ability to communicate over distances both physical and temporal. In such societies, common memory is less pervasive because the written record becomes a witness to the history of the use of human understanding, imagination and intellect. Or, put another way, writing is different from speech, and brings with it a different conception of the use of words. Nor is this dichotomy straightforward. It is important to realise that the uses of writing and literacy, like the uses of speech, have shifted and mingled with time, and that they are always subject and responsive to changing circumstances.

This is obvious, of course, but the larger point is that libraries and archives exist as a witness to human civilisation, and to the invention of writing. In their public use, they store the records of the past and present, against and beyond time. They allow us to understand the history of the transmission of texts and the artefacts that have been created to preserve them. If we are to understand the significance of the library (and, in present contexts, of the Alexander Turnbull Library), of what it is and does and its benefit to the common good, we must also try to understand what happens when writing does not exist.

One way of doing this is to study a non-literate society at the moment immediately prior to its interaction with the textual assumptions of a Euro-Asiatic invasion. To do so is problematic, not least because we cannot now listen into that society or observe its cultural practices. Nor are literate cultures neutral in their interpretative modalities. What we have, in a bibliographical sense, is a range of artefacts that have a textual meaning and that, therefore, may be described for the way in which they represent narrative structures: take, for instance, the carvings of the ancestors and gods to be found around the walls of a wharenui. What we also have, therefore, is a sequence of transmitted texts which, though imperfect as witnesses to the past, may be excavated for their underlying historical origins.

The shift from memory to written record is significant in more ways than simply the creation of a document. How we conceive and understand the nature of experience and time, the relationship of one moment to another, has not always been sequential, nor has the idea of assigning a date or time to an event always been regarded as necessary. To make this distinction more obvious, we might pose the difference as a question: if writing allows us to establish when and where something happened, then how does a non-literate culture record, and remember, the history of its dead?

The question is worth putting, even though for different societies and epochs there will be differing answers, because it immediately opens up a series of

intellectual problems which require that we turn away from assumptions about the influence of literacy; and instead turn to non-European and the earliest literate cultures, where the recovery of the past requires another conception of chronology, the forms of record, and the psychology of historical consciousness. The point might be made by taking Armando Petrucci’s study of written death in western culture, or Anthony Grafton’s study of Joseph Scaliger and his De emendatione temporum, and thinking about the other side of these narratives; of the mentalities that were displaced by the written record and the establishment of a chronological sequence: for instance, the necrologies of oral memory, and the concept of history as a repetitive process. Is

In a world without books, in a world where writing did not yet exist, society had to find ways of preserving information so that knowledge would not be forgotten; so that it could be passed from one person, from one generation, to another. If we simply tell a story, that story will change with the retelling and, therefore, if we are to preserve a common memory, significant features have to be embedded within the narrative structure. Such structures tend to have a pattern, a music; there tend to be key phrases, or epithets (in the Homeric poems, Athena is grey-eyed, Achilles swift-footed); and there tends to be a pattern of repetition so that certain key ideas are reinforced. Time tends to be associated with the seasons, with the sun and the moon. These habits of mind are so deeply embedded in our language and our lives that the traces of such practices are still everywhere apparent.

If we cannot return to the Sumerian and Egyptian mentalities to capture the moment and the effect of what writing implied, we can study something quite similar in the history of our own society. New Zealand was one of the last significant societies to record the experience of literacy; and because its introduction was rapid, and is the nearest in time, the records that are preserved allow us to appreciate processes that in other cultures occurred only slowly and in the distant past, where the oral traditions and many of the early records have disappeared without trace. The importance of whakapapa, whakatauki, waiata (genealogies, proverbs, songs), and the other forms of memorial record, not only as a witness to our own cultural inheritance, but as a comparative resource for Assyriological and proto-Semitic studies, requires no emphasis. What, instead, needs to be brought forward is the way in which the use of these witnesses to an oral tradition change our understanding of history.

In a world where the absolute assumptions not only of chronological order but chronological relationships between events has no fixed point of reference, there can be no absolute conception of time. As a consequence, narrative structures are much more concerned to establish the relationships between events, to place them within a web of references that locate a person or event in the order of being. We are familiar with this, for instance, in relation to whakapapa. Similarly, this is the beginning of the tenth chapter of Genesis:

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons bom after the flood. The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

The point of referring to the Flood, here, is not just to reinforce the memory of Noah’s ark and the power and providence of God, it is a means of situating a set of historical relationships as being before and after that event. We can, of course, compare such practices to the material and circumstances with which we are more familiar, but there is more to be achieved than simply exploring the difference between various mentalities. Such a comparison may also serve as a vehicle for understanding the connections between non-European and late medieval and early modem neo-literate societies, for instance, compared to the emdition of late European humanism or the overwhelming forms of documentation that characterise Eurasian societies at the turn of the 21st century.

This brings us, inevitably, to the crux proposed by Michel Foucault: that to recover the past, we need to recover not only its language, but also the paradigms (the habits and systems of thought) within which that language operates.' * Too readily we read history as a commentary on the present, rather than the past. Too readily, whether from convenience or neglect, we assume that the past is but a simplified, if sometimes strange, version of the present; and though, historically and theoretically, we know better than this, we rarely allow such an understanding to affect our approach to the meaning and transmission of the literary documents, to the way they are made and kept, and to the historical records that we purport to study.

We are on the cusp, therefore, between aesthetics and scholarship. A text does not simply bear witness to the telling of a story, it bears witness to an anterior history of a process of transmission and the mechanisms by which that was ensured. It was only with the technology of writing that the past could become forgotten, that it became not a memory but a reminiscence. This was, of course, Plato’s point (or rather, it was that of, or is reported to be that of, Socrates a detail that neatly illustrates how texts shift and change in their use and appropriation) in the Phaedrus:

But when they came to letters, Theuth said: 0 king, here is a study which will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a remedy both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. 20

These words will haunt such words as will follow, for they tell a story that is also the story of what a library is and does. Libraries are about the written word as a witness to memory, against and beyond time, and the users of them. If there is an axiom of their existence, it is the obvious truth that the present is never the best judge of the future, that the later use of a document will always be different from the purpose for which it was created and kept, and that we will never know when that new dispensation will come.

That distance, and the ability to compare and consider the relationship between different documents, enables a society or a person to reconsider the meaning of a text; to re-evaluate even its ethical purpose and importance. How we act as witnesses to the testimony of the past, how we interpret what was meant, involves more than just an exercise in hermeneutics. Put the same simple document in two languages, neither perfectly understood by the other party, place differing assumptions about the importance of oral and written testimony as qualification to their use in the interpretation of the documents concerned, situate those assumptions in radically differing conceptions of place and time, and one has something as politically febrile, as historically and legally open to dispute and understanding, as the Treaty of Waitangi." 1

II

Writing, libraries, archives, and a training in the interpretation of documents have always been linked, and the history of these relationships and how they developed is long and complex. 22 Such comments as follow, therefore, are intended (necessarily so) to be succinct and informative rather than exhaustive, but a sketch of the origins of writing and its transmission, from tablet and stone to papyrus and codex, together with some of the more important influences in that development, will serve a larger purpose.

All the earliest surviving written material is either on pottery or stone, and it is not until the 4th century bc that the earliest surviving papyrus of a Greek text survives a fragment of Timotheus. 23 It is, nevertheless, likely that papyrus was being used by the early 6th century bc and, certainly, there are enough references to it in the sth century that we can assume its use to have become widespread amongst literate communities. Owing to its physical qualities, papyrus cannot be folded but must be rolled, a quality that gives it a similar visual and organisational utility for reading as the computer.

Regrettably, there are no papyrus fragments in the Turnbull collections but, as the preferred surface for writing, papyrus survived for more than 1000 years. In the end, it was superseded by a combination of climatic change and a new religious dispensation (Christianity) that sought to preserve its documents on animal skins, or vellum. 24 Unlike papyrus, vellum can be folded and hence we have the birth of the codex, or the book as we know it. 25

The change from papyrus to vellum offers an important lesson for the end of the 20th century, for it underlines what happens when we shift from one kind of bibliographic form to another. The classical literature and historical accounts of Greece and Rome were preserved on papyrus. With the removal of Constantine and the Roman Empire to the East in 326 ad, the shift from pagan religion to Christianity at that time, and a shortage of papyrus, the copying of the historians and the poets went into decline and was displaced by the production of bibles and the works of the early Church fathers. As the commercial book-trade withered, the survival of traditional knowledge and learning also suffered, and by the mid-6th century, when the Lombards sacked Rome, the culture of more than a millennium of literacy disappeared from the West within decades. The dead were buried without record.

Even amongst those groups (primarily religious) who retained the most primitive skills, the decline in standards of literacy was everywhere pronounced. The falling competence in written and epigraphic skills can still be seen in the books that survive and the public inscriptions. The exception, a century and a half later, the epitaph of Pope Hadrian now kept in the porch of St. Peters, was a special gift from Charlemagne and it was a deliberate statement of a new beginning. h

It was the periphery that saved Europe. We all know about St Patrick in Ireland and The Book of Kells. York was another centre of monastic literacy. It was Alcuin, from York, who became Charlemagne’s chief minister. He cared about books, and as well as religious works it is to these decades that we owe the survival of classical works that were copied anew." 7 It was the books produced under Alcuin’s influence and that cultural policy that Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla and Poliziano, in turn, returned to as a model for their own renovation, the renaissance.

In between the era of Charlemagne and the renaissance lies the spread of medieval book production as first a monastic, and then later a commercial activity. The earliest manuscript in the Alexander Turnbull Library is appropriately, therefore, a magnificent fully illuminated copy of the De musica of Boethius dating from the second quarter of the 12th century (Figure 2). It is at this time that the cultural reemergence of books and learning in Europe occurred, with the rise of the Universities at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Bologna, and elsewhere, and with them the revival of the commercial book-trade.

The Turnbull Boethius, however, is a monastic production, and is linked to a number of manuscripts that were produced around Canterbury at this time. 2s In spirit, it is a product of the cultural policy of King Stephen and Henry II and their encouragement of learning. Providing, as it does, a link between the late Christian antiquity, and the rise of the new learning, it is a witness to how books come to represent much more than the history of their initial use, and it is (apart from anything else) a reminder that the transmission of the text is not the only thing that is important about a book.

Before printing was possible, certain other things had to have happened.

Cumulatively each might seem unimportant, but together these quite different developments made possible, or enhanced, the advent of print: the transition from pointed to flat chisels for epigraphy leading to flat-edged writing instruments and the use of the serif; the insertion of space between words; advances in optics and A 29 the invention of spectacles; and the invention (and widespread production) of paper.

Historically speaking, the serif came first; enabling letters to be linked together in a way that enhanced their legibility. The earliest known example dates from 336 bc, an inscription celebrating Alexander’s victory at Prienne earlier forms of script being monoline (i.e. as if written with a ball-point pen). This led, in due course, to the classic roman capital which was much later joined to the form of minuscule used during the reign of Charlemagne, from which we derive our most commonly used letter-forms. The second impulse was towards word separation. In the earliest written

documents, letter followed after letter, syllable after syllable, but these were not separated from one another to clearly identify words. Reading required a degree both of memorial retention as the meaning was made clear, and oral recitation to determine the pattern of syllabic use and construction. Between the second centuries bc and ad, it was common in formal inscriptions to separate words with points (a practice imitated by Jonson in Sejanus), but it was not until the 7th century that regular spatial separation of words became more prevalent. Inevitably, the use of space led to a second refinement: the development of more sophisticated forms of punctuation.

The other two most important influences on the pre-history of the printed books both passed into Europe through the Arabic influence in Spain during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Paper was originally a Chinese invention, but it came to Europe through the Moorish Conquest, as did optics. The spread of paper mills throughout Europe was a relatively slow phenomena, but by the 14th century several important centres were well established, including northern France and the Venetian basin. The paper trade increasingly catered to the universities and the appearance of an aristocratic and landed elite that kept records of their activities. To this can also be added the rise of the lay book trade, especially in centres of government and near the universities.

The invention of spectacles and advances in optics affected the book trade in two ways. First, and most obviously, it enhanced reading. Spectacles appear in the late 12th century, and immediately became associated with the spread of learning, signifying a participation in intellectual activity. Many a tired reader also lost their glasses, putting them down and closing the book, and then forgetting where they had put them. The other use of optics, however, is just as important. The earliest types were cut by goldsmiths, for the work required minute attention to detail under magnification. In many respects then, the invention of the press was not the primary event that changed the history of book production, but the one which made all previous developments cohere.

The first printed book, the Gutenberg Bible, was produced in 1455. Yet the initial impact of the press was not to release a flood of new learning, but rather to ensure the availability of well established classics by respected theologians and intellectuals. Thus, for instance, the works of Thomas Aquinas was produced at Mainz in 1463. Similarly, the oldest printed book in the Turnbull is a copy of Albertus Magnus’s Compendium Theologicae Veritatis, from ca 1470, followed closely by the Constitutiones of Pope Clement V, finished on 13 August 1471, and the Sermones de patienta in Job of St John Chrysostom (bound with the Albertus Magnus) and finished on 4 November 1471. These volumes are typical of a book-trade that initially saw its primary market as being an educated and largely clerical elite.

Something more of the flavour of the earliest printed books in the collection can be given, however, by selecting some rather different examples. If only for its original

English panelled binding, attention should be drawn to the earliest classical work in the Library, a copy of the 1477 edition of Appian’s Historia Romana et de bellis civilibus (Figure 3). This is a fine example of an elaborate early binding, prepared for an important book (and a wealthy client). It should serve to remind us that though we have come to privilege print, most early readers privileged the access to the text, whether in manuscript or print, and were prepared to commission expensive decoration to enhance the physical appearance of their copy. Another classical incunable of some importance in the Library is the 1493 Herodian: Herodian being the historian who described the effect of the eruption of Lake Taupo, making it the earliest known reference to New Zealand, though Herodian did not know from where the fiery sky over Rome came.

On the other hand, the 1478 Opera of Lactantius, printed in Venice by Andrea de Paltasichi and Bonini de Bonini, is one of those books that the modem world has all but forgotten, but which was endlessly reprinted during the 15th and 16th century. Lactantius was an early Church Father, who in an effort to refute pagan beliefs wrote extensively on the pagan gods. No self-respecting humanist poet with Ovid in one hand could, therefore, do without Lactantius in the other. The Turnbull copy

is a fine example of Venetian printing, lightly rubricated in red and blue, and extensively annotated in the relevant passages in a contemporary, and perhaps also a 16th-century, hand.

Rather closer to late medieval manuscript production is the 1472 De imagine mundi of Honorius, which once belonged to the famous bibliophile Henry Huth. Honorius was a monk from either Autun or Regensberg and taught during the first half of the 13th century. The book is an attempt to describe the known (or imagined) world, including its creation, Europe, Africa, Asia, Asia Minor and India, the four elements, the seasons, months and years, and the Holy Roman Empire. It is heavily rubricated, with the incipit elaborated with gold leaf, much in the manner one would expect of a manuscript. It has also been attentively read by a contemporary, particularly in the passage relating to India. It offers, as it were, a glimpse at how the world was understood as recently as twenty years before the discoveries of Columbus, though the text of Honorius had, of course, circulated in manuscript for the previous 250 years.

The discovery of the new world of Columbus was mirrored in Venice with the attempt to publish the classical, especially Greek, past through the efforts of the scholarly printer and publisher Aldus Manutius at the end of the 15th century. The impact of Aldus on the late 15th century book-trade is first marked in the collections by a copy of his 1495 Theocritus. Although this is a large folio, Aldus is perhaps most noted for his famous pocket-book editions of the classics, and for his Greek and Italic type, as much as his association with Erasmus. The Theocritus was among the first books printed by Aldus, and it was printed in the new Greek type, which was also used for the Aristotle of the same year. A smaller type was cut for his Aristophanes, and another for his 1502 editio princeps of Sophocles. The second Turnbull copy of the Sophocles is rather larger than the first and contains both a Latin manuscript poem on the death of Sophocles on the front fly-leaf (Figure 4), with annotations in the same hand throughout the text, linking lines in the plays to passages in the Adagia of Erasmus.

Further important manuscript annotations are found in the 1526 Aldine Greek editio princeps of Hippocrates (Figure 5). This volume has been carefully marked up throughout: underlining in the text and marking in the margin the beginnings of chapters, and corrections to the Greek text. The work of the reader is thorough and exhaustive, and the volume bears a strong resemblance to having been prepared as corrected editorial copy for a new edition, or of having been revised according to a later one. One possibility is that it served as a corrected Greek text that was used as the copy from which to make a Latin translation. Thus, for instance, the 1532 edition of the Aphorismi claims to be ‘Ad grsecum codicem summa diligentia recognita’, prior to its Latin translation. ' 0 A 1535 Latin translation of Hippocrates, also in the Turnbull collections, similarly possesses these chapter divisions that the 1526 Aldine lacks, as does the next Greek text, printed by Froben in 1538.

One perhaps significant feature of the Turnbull Aldine means that this particular copy requires further study by someone familiar with the medical and textual scholarship of the early 16th century: the signature of the owner who annotated the text has been tom from the title-page. It is common enough to find that signatures of quite famous owners of early books have been crossed through by later owners, simply because other early book-collectors usually valued a book more than a signature. ’ 1 What is unusual is the way in which the book has been damaged so crudely which might well imply that a later autograph hunter considered the signature more valuable than the book and its annotations. It is of some importance, therefore, that we come to understand the nature of the corrections, and their origins. It is only when we know the underlying manuscript, and the edition to which the

annotations relate, that we will be able to estimate from where they may have originated and whether the annotations are copied from, or whether they are the corrections for, a new edition. What the torn away signature is, is a clue, a missing fragment.

One final example of the kinds of scholarly and classical material to be found in the Turnbull collections ought to be brought forward. Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) is considered by many to have been the finest classical scholar since the advent of print. He had a genius for reconstructing fragments, and he was the first person to be entirely fluent in early Latin. Scaliger spent much of the last thirty years of his life reconstructing the chronology of the ancient world, and his De emendatione temporum (1583) ranks as the most important (and most forgotten) contribution that has ever been made to the development of historical thought. It was Scaliger who finally put all the pieces together and enabled the development of a truly comparative historiography of the classical and biblical past, a challenge immediately taken up by Sir Walter Ralegh, and in a different way by Milton.

Yet the implications of Scaliger’s revolution went much further than that. The reconstruction of a truly comparative historiography, provided the intellectual framework for a radical critique of the assumptions of absolute monarchy, and equally, under the influence of his protege Daniel Heinsius and English disciple John Selden, his re-ordering of the temporal world led to the establishment of the Law of the Sea (if there is no absolute monarchy, then all nations must be allowed free right of passage).

Second only to his work on historical chronology, is Scaliger’s edition of Manilius. Anthony Grafton has shown how Scaliger integrated both French and Italian textual practices to develop a far more sophisticated approach to problems of recension and emendation than his predecessors. This work reached its most sophisticated form with the 1579 edition of th eAstronomicon, which Scaliger revised in 1600. So good was Scaliger’s final edition that it was not until Housman’s fivevolume effort in the 20th century that his work was finally replaced, and Housman was left confirming many of Scaliger’s conjectures from witnesses that had emerged after his death. The Turnbull holds this second revised edition of the Manilius, in an early 17th-century English binding. There is a note on the front endpaper that it was bought second-hand on May 3 1658 for 4s 6d, and in another hand on the next leaf there is a note in the hand of a 17th-century owner.

Like the Hippocrates, however, the Manilius is more than just another copy of an early printed book. Facing the title-page is an extensive note, which is then followed by manuscript annotations in the margin in another hand. Both readers are learned. The first comments upon Christopher Schemer’s criticism of Scaliger and affirms the quality of Scaliger’s work. The second annotator may or may not be the same person who paid 4s 6d for the volume but, whoever it is, they read the edition thoroughly and their notes are terse and to the point.

What all these books have illustrated, of course, is not only a largely unknown aspect of the Turnbull collections, but also the way in which books serve as a witness to the past, and the way in which they have been used and engaged with as part of a larger community of knowledge. History, as D. F. McKenzie once remarked to a similar audience, ‘expands our mental space by liberating us from the tyranny of the present; and poetry frees us from that circumspection of the mind which petty fact daily dictates’. 32 Equally, real scholarship deepens our understanding of what we do not know obliging precision, tolerance and generosity in our conduct and imagination.

111

‘What I am driving at,’ said J. C. Beaglehole to this Library on its fiftieth anniversary,

is the statement, not very original, that New Zealand has we as New Zealanders have a responsibility towards civilisation; and I see it much more in terms of the library than of fighting in someone else’s backyard. I think this statement is a true one; and I think I see our realisation of its truth in terms of our history. . . . there are elements of independence in it, and elements of maturity. Our concern with the library let me give the thing a generic name has these elements. It has them in common with another institution of some intellectual significance in our country, the university. ... You cannot cut them arbitrarily apart. The university has three functions: to spread knowledge, to preserve knowledge, to extend knowledge; or, if you prefer to put it more actively, to teach men to think, to preserve the results of former thinking, to foster that sort of thinking called research. Are not the functions of the library the same? though fundamentally it may be devoted to providing the means of thought rather than training in thought. 33

Recently, the universities and libraries of New Zealand have seemed more than 30 years distant from those comments, but Beaglehole’s point remains as true and compelling now as it was then. It is not possible to develop complex scientific thought without complex human thought, and it is not possible to develop complex human thought without complex societies. Nor is it possible, in the faddish and solipsistic language of our day, to develop a knowledge economy without an awareness of the uses of language and thought, a thorough grounding in the liberal and scientific arts, and the encouragement of knowledge and research.

There is, in this language that is not so much used as abused, a false assumption that the computer, and its ability to endlessly produce data in irreducible form, is somehow an instrument of democracy, whereas the access and use of physical books is not. The assumption fails to perceive that the capacity to access data is not the same thing as the ability to think creatively with such resources, and that the human imagination and intellect restructure information according to other ends than merely the mechanical reproduction of detail. Nearly 20 years ago D. F. McKenzie made this point when welcoming the publication of Kathleen Coleridge’s A descriptive catalogue of the Milton Collection in the Turnbull Library.

In Areopagitica Milton expounds the most fundamental principle of free publication and open debate as guarantees of civil liberty. But

Milton’s impulse to write Areopagitica is incomprehensible without the contextual study of the seventeenth century book trade and its products. As an example of its projective force in the present, one could develop from Areopagitica a defence of the physical book in contrast to the formal mechanics of information retrieval. Pre-selected, institutionally controlled, commercially directed and ephemeral ‘information’ is no more accessible to the individual than authority, shorttime storage, and sophisticated technology (beyond the means of any individual) will permit. The portability and thoughtful privacy of the physical book, its hospitality (unlike VDU screens) to the formal shaping of consecutively presented thought, and even the coarse and publicly overt means required to suppress, censor or frustrate the adequate housing of physical books, make it a surer defence against institutional secrecy and its attendant, political tyranny. 34

The Turnbull copy of Areopagitica is now in that collection because of a dispersal of books that the British Library has had two centuries to repent at leisure. In the late 18th century the British Museum (as it was then called) brought together the collections of Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Hans Sloane, and the Royal Library, and embarked on a weeding of duplicates to raise funds for the development of its collections. At the top of the title-page of the Turnbull copy is a little mark ‘G.S2O’, something so insignificant that it is easily overlooked. On the verso of the titlepage is the duplicate sale stamp, dated 1787. With early printed books there are no such things as duplicates, but no-one appreciated that finer sense of historical contextualisation in the 1780 s; it was a second copy it was, as that small detail tells us, Sir Hans Sloane’s copy and they sold it. The British Library soon stopped the book sales, but for far too many books it was far too late and some have disappeared without trace. The copy of Milton’s Areopagitica, after circulating through dealers and private collectors for just over a century, was bought by Alexander Turnbull and since then has served as the foundation document of his library.

Much fuss is made of the Milton Collection, and for good reason: it is ‘a precious ornament’ and one that does contain ‘a potencie of life’. Rather less comment, however, is made on the English literature collection as a whole, and this is a pity. Turnbull bought with a sharp eye for condition and unerring taste, and later additions have only served to fill out and enrich the holdings. Owing to the important 1927 Mantell gift, 35 the Turnbull has the only collections of Jonson play quartos in the southern hemisphere, and one as substantial as all but the most important English and American libraries. The copy of The alchemist, for instance, is remarkably fine and only contains one uncorrected forme with one compositorial error (Figure 6): line 14 should read ‘claw’d, and flaw’d,’ not ‘claw’d, flaw’d,’. Similarly, the

Turnbull’s copy of Jonson’s collected Workes is one of the finer copies known to me, and the first printed edition of Donne’s 1633 Poems is still in its original binding and unpressed.

It would be tempting to run through a range of other material: Chaucer, Lady Mary Wroth, Carew, Dryden, Wycherley and Congreve, for instance, or Defoe, Gay, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Kipling; but two other items may stand as witnesses to the depth of these collections and their importance. The first is a copy of the first edition of Pope’s Essay on criticism, still in its original paper wrappers, and the second is a presentation copy from Byron to his friend W. R. Wright of the first edition of Childe Harold’s pilgrimage.

Such material has remained, for the moment at least, safe from the avarice of those who, in Sallust’s phrase, hold nothing too sacred to sell; yet there is much that gives cause for future concern. The development of the early printed collections, though required by statute, has been neglected for decades and the Library continues to be dependent on the occasional kindness of those donors who believe in the importance of such gifts. As a consequence, books and libraries have not been acquired, nor has the Library been able to build systematically upon its founding benefaction.

More worryingly, National Library policy has been seduced by the impulse to replace understanding with information and, repetitively, information upon information; erasing our awareness of the historical past, especially the history of how the collections of the Turnbull and the National Library were acquired, and why they were acquired. Arbitrary decisions made for financial and administrative convenience at the time, or for reasons that genuinely reflected practices in the past, have hardened into dogmatic assumptions about what constitutes useful material for a national collection to hold. The assumption is no longer that we need to take the broadest and most generous view of what a library ought to be, and of the kinds of knowledge we should value. The assumption, if there is any assumption other than the parsimony of means and a poverty of imagination, is that the codex has been replaced, or will soon be replaced, by ‘the formal mechanics of information retrieval’. This catastrophic assumption that information is somehow knowledge in turn makes old information redundant, and it turns the books of the past the most eloquent witnesses to our civilisation into a physical (and ideological) inconvenience: a witness to something we no longer wish to remember.

The simplistic criteria of a ‘New Zealand and the South Pacific’ collections policy, approved in 1996, and subsequently pursued with a ruthless and indiscriminate thoroughness until late 1999, would have removed from the General Collections every book published in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, that was more than 20 years old and not used in the previous ten years. 36 This policy ignored the fact that these books had disappeared from view because of an earlier failure to begin the retrospective and systematic cataloguing in electronic form of

the material that was only accessible through the microfiche copies of the old card catalogue. This policy placed the greater part of the National Library collections at risk. In the way it was formulated it ignored the work of some of the most significant New Zealand scholars in the humanities this century. 7 Whether it be art history or engineering, Marx or Milton Friedman, the works of Freud, or even the essays of Lionel Trilling, almost all the material the National Library holds in its General Collections falls outside of the narrow definition of the collections policy. The history of print culture, in its physical and electronic forms, is not circumscribed by New Zealand and the South Pacific; nor can an educated society afford to ignore the wider, global context in which we live.

The disposals that took place were deeply irresponsible, but the nature of the material at risk has not been well understood. A few books, therefore, will have to represent a multitude. These books were (with one exception) acquired by the old National Library Service, long before it was wedded by Act of Parliament to the Turnbull Library in 1965, and they illustrate the way in which the National Library

at the time took a generous view of what was appropriate to collect as modem literature. They vary from the Obras completas of Federico Garcia Lorca, first published in 1954 and acquired early the following year, to a first French edition of Sartre’s Les mains sales (1948), acquired in 1966 and subsequently much lent. Similarly, the Library acquired, within months of publication, the first English edition of one of Sartre’s political works, Portrait of the anti-Semite (1948). At that time, the Library also bought Andre Malraux in first editions. The title-page of Equisse d’une psychologie du cinema (1946), published in a limited edition of 1075 (the Library copy is number 217), is a fine statement of neo-classical typography in red and black: a clear affirmation of a typographic order after the disorder of the Second World War. Even more austere is the title-page to Malraux’s study of Goya, Saturne (1950).

All of this material, indeed the larger part of the General collections (including the Fiction collection) ought to be transferred to the Turnbull as an intellectual and scholarly resource. If it is to remain where it is, it should certainly not be subject to changing political whims. Whether through the Turnbull or the National Library, this material requires the commitment of curatorial and financial resources. The importance of the Turnbull Library, as the pre-eminent national research institution in the humanities, is something that this society cannot afford to undervalue. The preservation and development of its research collection, viewed with the most generous of purposes in mind, and the proper valuing of humanities research in the universities, are matters that can no longer be glibly passed over simply because they do not immediately satisfy some arbitrarily selected range of short-term financial criteria. If we are to remain an advanced, tolerant, and civil society, if we are to keep the circulation of learning alive and accept the responsibility that this involves, if we value the flourishing of all human endeavour, we have no choice but to respect the intellectual and cultural inheritance that these institutions nurture. The Library and the University are the ‘copy and book’ that fashion others.

IV

Sometimes words are spoken, sometimes they are sung; sometimes they are written down and kept. The rest is silence.

Support the Alexander Turnbull Library through being a member of

The Friends of the Turnbull Library P O Box 12-186 Wellington, New Zealand

Turnbull Library Record 33 (2000), 11-34

References 1 This paper is dedicated to the memory of Professor D. F. McKenzie, whom I last saw in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, three weeks before he died in March 1999. We talked at that time about some of the ideas that are discussed here. His example as a teacher and scholar, and his personal kindness, touched many. To the Turnbull Library, he was always a true friend: generous both of time and spirit, and as a benefactor. The paper was delivered to a meeting of The Friends of the Turnbull Library on 24 August 1999. I would like to thank the Friends for the invitation to speak, the Library for allowing the paper to be presented in the reading room, and Robert Petre for the assistance he provided in displaying the works that are mentioned here. I would also like to thank Dr Brian Opie, who chaired the meeting, for his generous introduction. The view of library policy with which this paper concludes is a product of my own contribution to the debate and is informed by my professional interests. The statements made are ones for which I alone am responsible. The quotation from Claudian is from the preface of De raptu Proserpinae. The English dramatist Ben Jonson (1572-1637) underlined it in his copy of Claudian’s Opera (Antwerp: 1585) which has been in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, since 1658; shelfmark 8° C. 90 Art. Seld, B 1 2 B. Jonson, Workes, 2 vols, STC 14753-4 (London: 1640), ‘Discoveries’, Q2\ 3 W. Cornwallis, Essayes, STC 5775 (London: 1600), Bl'. 4 W. Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, 11.iii.31-2. The passage was not printed in the 1600 Quarto. 5 W. Cornwallis, Essayes, A2 r . 6 M. de Certeau, The practice of everyday life, trans. by S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 174. 7 Plato, The dialogues, translated by B. Jowett, 4th ed., re-ed. By D. J. Allan and H. E. Dale, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), v. 3, p. 85. 8 Pliny, the younger, ‘To Maecilius Nepos’ (Epistolae Il.iii), in The letters of the younger Pliny, trans. by B. Radice (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 61. 9 W. Shakespeare, King Lear, Li. 226-7. 10 For a discussion of the importance of literary and historical fragments see G. W. Most (ed.), Collecting fragments (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997). 11 For an introduction, see F. Coulmas, The writing systems of the world (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 12 M. L. West, The east face of Helicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 63. 13 For some general reflections on these issues: [N. J. Barker], ‘The Survival of the Past’, The Book Collector, 45 (1996), 437-56. 14 A. Petrucci, Writing the dead: Death and writing strategies in the western tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 3. 15 The classic study is: M. Ventris and J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 16 For the early development of the Greek alphabet see L. H. Jeffery, The local scripts of archaic Greece, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 17 See, R. Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Also, J. Svenbro, ‘Archaic and classical Greece: The invention of silent reading’, in A history of reading in the West, ed. by G. Cavallo and R. Chartier, trans. By L. G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). 18 See, A. Petrucci, Writing the dead', A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A study in the history of classical scholarship, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983-93). 19 See, M. Foucault, The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970); The archaeology of knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972). 20 Plato, Dialogues, in. 106 ; cf. J. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), pp. 63-171.

21 For an important bibliographical study see D. F. McKenzie, ‘The sociology of a text: Orality, literacy and print in early New Zealand’, most recently published with his ‘Bibliography and the sociology of texts’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 77-130. 22 For the early history of classical scholarship: R. Pfeiffer, A history of classical scholarship from the beginnings to the end of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). 23 Illustrated in S. Morison, Politics and script: Aspects of authority andfreedom in the development of Graeco-Latin script from the sixth century bc to the twentieth century ad, ed. by N. J. Barker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp.ll-12. 24 For the importance of vellum for Christians, see St. Paul, n Timothy 4.13: ‘The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.’ 25 See C. H. Roberts &T. C. Skeat, The birth of the codex (London, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1983). This classic study has generated a substantial body of further literature. Also, G. Cavallo, ‘Between volumen and codex: Reading in the Roman world’, in A history of reading in the West, pp. 64-89. 26 Morison, Politics and script, pp. 170-3; A. Petrucci, Writers and readers in medieval Italy: Studies in the history of written culture, ed. and trans. by C. M. Radding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 106-8. 27 R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the written word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 28 For full details: M. M. Manion, V. F. Vines and C. F. R. de Hamel, Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in New Zealand collections (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 1989), pp. 122-4. 29 What follows is indebted to: Morison, Politics and script', M. B. Parkes, Pause and effect: An introduction to the history of punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992); J. Dreyfus, ‘The invention of spectacles and the advent of printing’, The Library, s. 6 10 (1988), 93-106; G. Pollard, ‘Notes on the size of the sheet’, The Library, s. 4 22 (1941), 105-37. 30 Hippocrates, Hippocratis Aphorismi, cvm Galeni Commentariis (Paris: 1532), Al r . I have consulted the Bodleian copy, Vet. El c. 6. 31 It is, in fact, for this reason that the signature of the famous Dutch geographer, Abraham Ortelius, was crossed through in the Library’s copy of De varia historia by Leonicus Thomaeus (Basle: 1531). 32 D. F. McKenzie, ‘John Milton, Alexander Turnbull and Kathleen Coleridge’, Turnbull Library Record, 14 (1981), 106-111 (p. 106). 33 J. C. Beaglehole, ‘The Library and the cosmos’, Turnbull Library Record, n.s. 3 (1970), 74-5. 34 D. F. McKenzie, ‘John Milton, Alexander Turnbull and Kathleen Coleridge’, p.l 11. Kathleen Coleridge’s catalogue of the Turnbull’s Milton Collection was published in 1980 by Oxford University Press, Oxford, for the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. 35 R. Barrowman, The Turnbull: A library and its world (Auckland: Auckland University Press, in association with Historical Branch, Dept of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1995), pp. 42-3. 36 With the change of government in November 1999, the disposal of books ceased. It is not yet evident, however, whether the collections policy will be modified. Although the Turnbull Library endeavours to collect the work of New Zealand scholars published both locally and abroad, it lacks the resources and databases to ensure its collections are complete. Increasingly, the overseas publications of New Zealand scholars (especially periodical articles) are not available through the Library. 37 I have in mind, for instance, the publications of Sir Ronald Syme (Latin history and Tacitus), Peter Dronke (medieval Latin poetry), J. B. Trapp (humanism and the Renaissance), D. F. McKenzie (bibliography, 17th-century literature and Congreve), J. G. A. Pocock (early-modern intellectual history, feudalism, Machiavelli, and Gibbon), and Robert Burchfield (lexicography), to name only some of the most familiar.