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What Closing Can Mean
by Brian Kennedy, Customer Service Bibliographer
At last count, I have borrowing privileges at sixteen separate libraries, both academic and public. I also have (much to the chagrin of a group of friends who recently helped my wife and me move to a new apartment) over one thousand books in my home library, with half again as many volumes in storage at my mother's house. In short, I rest at the center of a vast web of bibliographic possibility, a position which I have long taken for granted, and the significance of which I have only just begun to realize.
Consider the following: I have, on my desk, a copy of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, for which he was awarded the National Book Award in 1979, and which I recently purchased at a local book shop for the princely sum of fifteen dollars. If, for whatever reason, I lost the book halfway through my reading, and could not spare the funds within my budget to buy another copy, I need only hop in the car and pick a direction - the book is available at twelve of my libraries and, according to the various online catalogues, all copies are currently available.
This access is positively luxurious, and to a certain extent (as a librarian recently pointed out to me), books need no longer be considered scarce resources at all. Humanly speaking, of course, this access has its limitations. There are books I own that I will never read, and there are books in libraries that I will never borrow. But the great joy, again, is in the possibility.
"A library," Umberto Eco wrote, "is the best possible imitation, by human beings, of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and understood at the same time. A person able to store in his or her mind the information provided by a great library would emulate in some way the mind of God. In other words, we have invented libraries because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we try our best to imitate them."
Omniscience, though, without omnipotence is a fragile state. It can end abruptly, and often for the most mundane of reasons. Consider the fifteen-branch library system of Oregon's Jackson County, closed since April for lack of funds, though set to re-open (at half-strength and with operations outsourced to a Maryland corporation) later this fall. Nearly two-hundred thousand people without access to a public library for six months. Though I know there are many, many persons in the world who, for political or economic reasons, have never had access to a library, in this land of plenty the thought of Jackson County is troubling, particularly for a bibliophile like myself.
Yet, at the risk of sounding rude, I must point out that if these libraries were never to reopen, the world of knowledge would not suffer irrevocable damage. After all, the average content of a modern library is, for the most part, replaceable and widely available elsewhere. The Jackson County copy of The Snow Leopard (available there on audio book as well), if lost to the world, could be easily supplemented by, say, one of the seven copies currently available in the Toronto Public Library system, or my own copy, or the ninety-four used and new copies listed at the time of this writing on Amazon.com. Now, in all these cases, the citizens of Jackson County would still be at a disadvantage, but the book would still exist, at least somewhere. The possibility continues.
It is of true scarcity, though, that we should be fearful. Imagine that my personal copy of The Snow Leopard was the only one left, that some Matthiessen-hating Savonarola had swept the globe clean, but was (mercifully) burnt at the stake before arriving on my doorstep. Suddenly, my fifteen-dollar paperback has become immeasurably valuable for those who wish to encounter Matthiessen's pilgrimage to the Crystal Mountain. In this scenario, our collective push toward omniscience is threatened, and the smallest of accidents - a kitchen fire or a spilled cup of coffee - could spell our doom.
This is only half in jest. There are still library collections throughout the world that are irreplaceable - once lost, they are lost forever. The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, for instance - the Vatican Apostolic Library. Established in the fifteenth-century, its holdings include over seventy-five thousand manuscripts, one million printed books, and eighty-five hundred incunabula. There is the Codex Vaticanus, from the fourth century, the oldest extant copy of the Bible. There is De arte venandi cum avibus, a thirteenth-century work on the art of falconry. There are even seven of Botticelli's late fifteenth-century illustrations for the works of Dante. The list continues, a litany of unlimited value.
Which makes the closure of this same library for the first time in its five-hundred year history such an important event. Beginning in July of this year, the BAV is closed for a three-year emergency renovation project, undertaken to repair structural and foundational damage caused by time and the weight of books. Oddly enough, in order to safeguard the knowledge it contains, the library must be closed to the public, a period of temporary convalescence necessary for the long term health of the patient.
Yet, so successful have been the modern efforts at preservation, access to the Vatican's collection is still quite comprehensive - scholars can continue to order photographic reproductions, and certain manuscripts and books will be available on a limited basis. What's more, tens of thousands of manuscripts and manuscript catalogues are available on microfilm through the Knight's of Columbus Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University. This closure of the BAV is really more about limited access to a building, rather than the knowledge it contains.
The Vatican, with its institutional memory stretching across two millennia, is well placed to understand the problems associated with the preservation and diffusion of knowledge. As much as the Church has been able to preserve throughout the ages, an equal amount (if not more) has been lost. Remember the Library of Alexandria, for instance. Founded by Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty in the pre-Christian era, it was thought to house the entire knowledge of the ancient world. No one is quite sure how, or when, it was destroyed. But it is gone, nonetheless, and its absence continues to trouble the modern imagination. Faced with its demise, we feel as if we've lost out on the accumulation of knowledge promised by the idea of the library, and so can never be satisfied with what we know in the present. We assume that what was lost is essential, and that if we could just pin down the truth, just know what it is we're missing, then we'd finally be happy, or wise.
I'm not saying that this is right or wrong, only that it is - and that I'm a part of it. The desire for omniscience is never satisfied because it is never quite complete, yet it is what we - those happy fools who cannot live without our libraries and our books - strive for, and what we hold in hope. "There is a source for this deep restlessness," Peter Matthiessen wrote, "and the path there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home."
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