Peek inside the Rare Book Room

I want to talk for a bit about what was truly magical about being an academic: the rare book room. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I feel a bit dismal about my own PhD journey. Huge swaths of American Academia are a scam. I’m not alone in thinking this. But. But! There is real beauty alongside the politics and bureaucracy. And that beauty is worth saving, and worth celebrating.

And to be around that many books and that many people who want nothing more than to talk about the last thing they read… is wonderful. It’s a crime to take that feeling; that sense of joy, and turn it into a classist racket. But the feeling is no less beautiful and uplifting.

I have high hopes for a return to sanity in education. Well. As-yet-unsquelched hopes, at any rate. And I don’t think it can be done without keeping the positive firmly in mind.

The Joy of Learning

I remember when I felt the most joy I have ever felt as an academic. It was 2010. I was in my first year as a PhD student. I traveled the 60 miles from Stony Brook to Penn station, and then another five or so up to Columbia, specifically to Butler Library’s rare book room.

We could go into the darker side of the rare book room as a concept. We could talk about the ways in which colleges in general commodify knowledge. 

THE vvorkes of Sir Thomas More Knyght

But for now, look over my shoulder as I open a book from 1557, containing the English writings of Sir Thomas More, died a martyr some twenty years earlier. The leather binding is huge and old and dry. It smells magnificent: leathery and musty and warm. Printed in 2 columns of stately black-letter. It is a massive book. It’s the sort of book you imagine a wizard opening in some movie. It’s full of very creative religious polemics. More wrote endless open-letters against the nascent Protestant movement.

Actually, if you want to know a bit about More’s writing, look no further than his modern analogue, C. S. Lewis. Both achieved blockbuster success for a work of fiction. Utopia in More’s Case; the Chronicles of Narnia in Lewis’s case. But for each, that work of fiction was the least part of an oeuvre devoted mostly to scholarship and religious writings. If you only know Lewis from Narnia you might not expect that his work includes such titles as: English Literature in the 16th Century Excluding Drama or The Case for Christianity among literally dozens of other titles. 

Saint Sir Thomas More, Flame Warrior

So, too with Thomas More. You might not know that he wrote open letters to Martin Luther, William Tyndale and other famous Protestants. These letters ran into the hundreds of pages each. And they were vicious. Open letters between 16th century religious leaders were often little more than flame-wars. And were rarely as polite.

One of More’s attacks on Martin Luther: “So let him not be disheartened nor at any rate so foolish as to decide that the battle must be waged by reason; all that needed to be employed were reproaches and insults on every page, thicker than winter snow, of which an inexhaustible stream would gush forth from Luther’s breast.”

(A Response to Luther, Book 1)

Or that he translated both Latin and Greek. Getting into the wild ride that is More’s opera omnia (complete works) would be an article by itself, and not a short one.

Why was I reading Thomas More in a rare book room? Honestly, it’s not important. Yes, I was writing an essay about him. But I didn’t need original sources to do so. So really I was just curious.

Utopia: An Interlude

Not everyone has read Utopia. Though everyone should. It’s a weird book. Tradition holds that there are two parts (“Book 1” and “Book 2,” conveniently enough). I would argue that the prefaces are part of the fiction and constitute a third part. But more on that in a moment. The second part boasts of a greater reputation. It describes the land of Utopia in which people work shorter hours, live in communal settings, and generally live in ways that suggest an Epicurean or Stoic paradise. In short the argument of Book 2 is: even non-Christians understand the components of a good life. So why should we Christians remain mired in corruption and backwardness?

The really clever part of Book 2 is that it takes the form of travelogue. Columbus and Vespucci were contemporaries of More. From the European perspective, there lay this whole world somewhere out there awaiting discovery. Nobody knew what they might find. But it seems their most ardent wish was to find a people who had figured it out. People who had organized their society around the health and happiness of the many, not the luxury and adoration of the few. Still waiting on that, btw.

What endears Utopia to centuries of readers is precisely this passionate, even naive, focus on creating a just society. More was not some idealistic kid. He was a thirty-eight year old man who had spent several years, if not decades, in the English bureaucracy. His arguments for a better world, a better system of government have the weight of decades of anger and disappointment behind them, as well as that unquenchable hope for a better tomorrow.

The King of France is a Greedy, Bloodthirsty Jackass

One passage particularly stands out. The narrator of Utopia, Raphael Hythloday, imagines what role a philosopher might have at court. A true philosopher, that is. One with hard-won ethics and values.

The scene he sets depicts the French King asking for advice on how to hold on to his conquests in Milan, Naples, etc. The rest of the councilors are full of advice on making an alliance with this or that state. Then Hythloday offers his advice:

[L]et Italy alone and stay at home, since the kingdom of France was indeed greater than could be well governed by one man…

(Utopia)

Why Don’t we get Practical Jokes like this Anymore?

More could have written a more blatant parody of the travel writings of his day. But he made every attempt to show that Utopia was a real place. Even the introductory letters (the third part of the book, in my estimation) make Utopia seem like a real place. The guys writing these letters? They’re in on the joke. These are not just any letters, either. They’re written by the major scholars of the day. Imagine if the president of a major University wrote an introduction to the next printing of Lord of the Rings, and the introduction said (with a straight face) that they (a University President) had visited Middle Earth (a fictional book setting) and found it just as beautiful as Tolkien describes. 

The only hint to the practical joke was that ou-topia is Greek for ‘nowhere.’ Oh and the other place-names throughout the book are also Greek in-jokes. Not everyone speaks Greek.

But yeah. Seriously. This stuff happened.

The past is a weird place.

And yes, More probably contributed enormously to the racist and pernicious myth of the noble savage. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Look around the Room

As you behold these pages with me, keep in mind that this is my first time being left to my own devices in a rare book room. I don’t recall being brought here as part of the campus tour when I was an undergrad. Figures. But I’ve been on tours of rare book rooms as part of my grad school education. And yet. Like I said: this is my first time alone, without training wheels.

I’m sitting at a wooden table whose surface is about the size of a child’s bed: five feet by two or three. There are a dozen such tables spaced evenly on one side of a glass partition. Next to the tables are doors to the very restricted stacks. On the other side of the partition are the computers and card catalogues. (Yes they still had card catalogues to supplement the computers. Rare manuscript libraries are difficult to catalogue. I’m sure they’ve digitized since, but at the time they hadn’t.) At one desk on this side of the partition there sits a librarian. To request a book, you have to hand-write the insanely complicated call number on a little card, then give it to them.

It takes an eternity for the books to come. Not because the system is inefficient but because the excitement makes time flow like pudding. Milliseconds become perceptible, like individual brushstrokes when you stand too close to a painting.

Finally, the librarian returns with a metal cart that looks like it survived the firebombing of Dresden. On it are the books I requested: the library’s complete holdings on Thomas More, and also a book on cosmology, because why not?

How to Hold a Book

There are foam blocks to keep the book from opening all the way, lest the book open too far and crack the spine. Not all books are that fragile, but some of them are. And a rare book room wouldn’t be a rare book room unless the books were too expensive to risk. And there are “snake weights” (lead pellets wrapped in some sort of fabric) to weigh down the pages so you can read the book without gifting too much sweat and oil to the page. Sometimes a rare book room will require the use of gloves. That’s the stereotype, right? I even recall asking the librarian about it.

“Gloves make your hands clumsy. They damage the book more in the long run. You’re more likely to tear the pages.”

I’m about 25 as this story is taking place. I’m not really used to being treated like an adult, unsupervised. Or, even to the extent that I am, most of my life has still, at this point, been otherwise. So a few words of caution and I’m turned loose. This is not what I’m used to in a regular library, much less in a library where each book represents a substantial investment of time and money. 

I’m not the Only Bookworm Here

It’s glorious. I feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store. The joy is nearly religious. Suddenly, as my eye scans the pages, something strikes me, and I walk over to the desk to ask the supervising librarian.

“Why are there little holes in the pages?”

“Bookworms,” the librarian answers with a shrug implied in her tone of voice.

“Bookworms? Worms that eat books? Those are real?” I had always been told I was a bookworm. It seems simple in retrospect. But it had never occurred to me that the term was a metaphor, derived from a real-life phenomenon.

I feel as if I’ve been told dragons are real. Or Leonardo’s ornithopters. 

“Worm” is a catchall term for pests. Lots of different pests like to eat the leather binding or the glue that holds the pages in place (made from rendered animal-hide) or the fungus that grows in poorly ventilated libraries. But to do that they have to worm their way through the book. And yet the idea of being born in a book and consuming it for sustenance remains an oddly comforting image. In its way.

The Weight of History, or So How does it Feel to Touch a 460-Year-Old Book?

There is something about reading a book that is literally 460 years old that is just magical. Books, even a stately well-made book like

THE
vvorks of Sir
Thomas More, Knyght, Sometyme
Lorde Chauncellour of England,
written by him in the En-
glysh tonge.

Printed at
London at the costes and charges
of John Cawod, John VValy,
and Richarde Tottell.
Anno 1557.

is so delicate and fragile. It almost hurts to touch it. Every nerve-ending is electrified. And not only because one false move might lead to a five-decimal repair-bill.

No. 

It’s also because reading a book like that lets you see things in a new light.

Thomas More in Context

For instance, did you know that these, the Collected Works in English of Thomas More, do not contain Utopia? Read back over the absurdly long title you probably skipped. “In the Englysh tonge” does not mean that the works in question were translated into English. These are the works he wrote in English. And which were those?

The religious ones. Thomas More, Catholic saint, had all of his religious writings published. Look at that year again. 1557. Elizabeth didn’t ascend the throne until 1558. So this was published, as would be expected, under the so-called Bloody Mary.

Utopia, being a work that criticized both Church and State, was, perhaps wisely, left out. It’s amazing to think. Utopia made More’s reputation for five hundred years in almost every country with an alphabet. And yet it was looked on as the black sheep of his writings by his contemporaries and direct descendants. People can be such hypocrites.

This Book is a Leather-Bound Ingrate

The thing worth remembering here is that books have their own lives. They are born for certain reasons and they live and die for other reasons. This book is kept alive likely because of Utopia. (I can assure you that Columbia’s holdings in the opera omnia of other early 16th century English divines is much lighter. Thomas More is of universal interest precisely because Utopia was such a blockbuster And yet The Complete Works is a book that specifically avoids paying tribute to Utopia.

It makes you sad to read books like that. To feel the weight of political one-upmanship around an author best known for his critique of such jockeying. And best known for giving voice to his hope that maybe, some day, somewhere, people would stop making their decisions for political reasons.

You should know that, Covid willing, you too can visit a rare book room. Even if you’re not associated with a university. Call up the library division. Tell them you’re writing an article that requires archival research. Even if you’re not. Use your wiles. Universities hoard books by dead white men and even the good ones, like Utopia are kept from the people who most need to see them. You owe it to yourself to try anyway. Trust me. I’ve pretended to need a specific thing loads of times, when really I just needed the ambiance. Tell them you need to see the shives.

Come prepared when you go to a rare book room. Bring tissues if you need them. The grief is heavier than the books. And the books are heavy.

I don’t think I repeated this idyll too many times. I was so nervous that I might go all butter-fingers. As I sat there, I could hear that potential, future RRRIIIIIPPPPP echoing through my thoughts like the accusations of a haunting spirit.