into two classes, those who are astonished that it has not got every
book in the world, and those who marvel that it possesses so many books
as it does. Nothing is commoner than the remark, "I suppose you have
everything that ever was printed," unless it is the exclamation, "You
surely do not keep all the rubbish!" These two sets of ideas may be
taken to represent the two tendencies which affect every public library;
and by consequence every complete catalogue of its contents, that of
mechanical accretion, and that of intelligent selection. The operation
of the Copyright Act is, of course, responsible for most of the element
of "rubbish" in the catalogue; while a moment's thought will show the
impossibility of making the librarian a censor, and allowing him to
exclude whatever might not square with his prejudices or fancies. A
considerable part of the catalogue, therefore, must be devoted to
recording publications of little intrinsic value, but even here there is
an important reservation to be made. Time, which in so many instances
abates the value of what is really precious, makes in a fashion amends
by bestowing worth on what was once of little account. What would we not
give for a _Court Gazette_ of the days of Augustus, or a list of odds at
the Olympic games? There is absolutely no telling what value the most
insignificant details of the nineteenth century may possess for the
nineteenth millennium: even now men of letters might find the same
intellectual stimulus in many a trivial page of the Museum Catalogue, as
a distinguished living orator is said to find in Johnson's Dictionary.
Next to this automatic factor in the increase of the catalogue may be
named the element of seeming accident—the addition to the library of
various classes of books, now at one time, now at another, as apparent
chance, but actual law has prescribed. If we can imagine the various
constituents of the Museum Library piled upon one another in
chronological sequence, and a shaft driven down from the top, we may
conceive ourselves coming upon a succession of strata, as the geologist
finds when he bores for coal, or the archæologist when he explores the
site of a city where men have dwelt from the age of Hercules to the age
of Heraclius. The Museum was founded by a great physician; the library,
therefore, rests upon a sound substratum of old medical books. The King
was the next important benefactor; next above early medicine and natural
history, accordingly, comes a stratum of royal libraries from the first
Tudor to the last Stuart, each a miniature representative of the best
literature of its time. The Hanoverian sovereigns, though no great
patrons of letters, were diligent collectors of pamphlets: hence the
priceless collection of Civil War and other important tracts which
immediately succeeded the donations already mentioned. As the growth of
the Museum attracted further liberality ("To him that hath shall be
given"), the collection naturally took an impress from the tastes of the
private collectors by whom it was enriched. Hence abundant wealth in
classics and the early literature of the Latin family of languages,
accompanied by poverty in languages which the collectors did not
understand, and subjects for which they did not care. When, thanks to
Panizzi, the library at last obtained an adequate grant for purchases,
the librarian's own intelligence became a much more important factor
than formerly. To continue our metaphor, the contents of the recent
strata would be found far more composite than of old, and more puzzling
to the intellectual geologist. He would come upon various fragmentary
formations, as it were, in which, trifling and remote effects of
prodigious causes, he would discern vestiges of the great events of the
time. Thus the growth of Greater Britain is legible in piles of colonial
newspapers, and the Paris Commune is represented by a mass of
caricatures and the scorched books of an Imperial Prince, literally
saved out of the fire. It is the librarian's business at once to profit
by this tendency to the accumulation of specialities, and to counteract
it: to take advantage of every opportunity that may arise of enriching
the library in definite directions, and at the same time of providing
for the steady influx of miscellaneous literature, alike of the past and
of the present as regards foreign nations: of English contemporary
literature the Copyright Act, as above explained, takes sufficient care.
It seems paradoxical, but it is true, that the Museum should be the home
both of the books which every one expects to find in it, and of those
which no one expects to find—of the literary freight which can ride the
ocean, and of that which would perish without the haven of a public
library. The catalogue must be the mirror of the library, and it is not
the least of the many advantages of print that the public have now much
better means than formerly of judging how the most difficult functions
of librarianship have been understood and discharged at the Museum. In
this connection mention may be made of a minor feature of the
publication of the catalogue of considerable importance: the issue of
extra copies of special articles as excerpts, sold separately at the
lowest possible price. In this manner bibliographies, complete as far as
the Museum collections are concerned, of Aristotle, Bacon, Bunyan,
Byron, Dante, Goethe, and other writers of special importance have been
issued. These should be of great value to students, and would probably
have a large sale if their existence were more generally known. At
present, like other Museum publications, they suffer from imperfect
publicity. Another very valuable appendix to the catalogue of printed
books is the catalogue of maps and plans, reduced, under Professor
Douglas's direction, from upwards of three hundred of MS. to two volumes
of print as issued to the public, or fourteen as laid down for use in
the Reading Room. The four hundred and fifty MS. volumes of the
catalogue of music, it is hoped, are on the eve of undergoing similar
treatment.
Apart from the errors which must inevitably creep into so vast a work,
dealing with such a variety of languages and literatures, and now in
progress for more than fifty years, a considerable amount of
imperfection is evidently inseparable from the very nature of the
undertaking. It does not and cannot represent the condition of the
library at any given moment. The volumes containing A, for example, will
comprise the books under that letter possessed by the Museum in 1882 or
1883; but T, which for reasons which we have no space to explain, will
probably be the last letter to be printed, will represent the condition
of the library, as regards that letter, about the year 1900. During the
whole progress of the catalogue an incessant shower of new titles
representing the new books continually being acquired, will have been
descending at the rate of some 40,000 a year. Those belonging to letters
not yet at press will have been taken up and absorbed by the catalogue
in its progress; those belonging to the letters already in type must
fall into a supplement. The article Thackeray, therefore, will be more
complete than Dickens, and Thucydides than Herodotus. As concerns the
student at the Museum, this is of no importance; the additions being
regularly incorporated in the Reading Room catalogue in the manner above
described. The catalogue as issued to subscribers, however, is
necessarily imperfect and irregular. Supposing, for example, that Lord
Tennyson and Mr. Browning were to simultaneously publish translations of
Homer when the printing of the catalogue had reached the article Jones,
Lord Tennyson's version would appear under Tennyson, but not under
Homer, and Mr. Browning's version would not appear at all. There is but
one way of obtaining a perfect index to the condition of the national
library at a given time: the catalogue must be reprinted along with the
numerous accessions which have been accumulating while the first edition
has been going through the press—a national undertaking which will
commend itself to men of letters more readily than to ministers of
finance. Should, however, the completion of the catalogue nearly
coincide with the commencement of the twentieth century, it may be hoped
that this will be one of the many ways in which, if the new century does
not, like its predecessors, find the nation traversing a crisis, the
epoch will assuredly be commemorated. It would remain to provide for the
regular reprinting of the catalogue with its accessions at intervals,
say of a quarter of a century. England would then possess a complete
index to the growth of the national library, and the world would have
the nearest approach to a register of all literature that, in the
absence of any feasible scheme for a universal catalogue by co-operation
among public libraries, it seems likely to obtain. Even this more
ambitious project might be promoted if public libraries would consent to
take the Museum Catalogue as a basis, and publish lists of such of their
own books as are not to be found in it. By this means the expense and
labour of cataloguing would be very greatly reduced, and the combination
of these lists with the Museum Catalogue, when this came to be printed
for the third time, say about 1925, would at last provide the
desideratum of a universal register of literature.
Ambitious undertakings like these, however, depend upon the co-operation
of many governments and many institutions. We can speak with more
confidence of the efforts of the Museum to provide what is only second
in importance to the catalogue itself—a classified index of its
contents. With this object in view several copies of the catalogue are
printed on one side only, that when completed they may be cut up, and
the titles sorted according to subject, and re-arranged in classified
lists. Thus by simply putting together all titles bearing the press
mark E, we shall obtain a separate catalogue of the Civil War Tracts;
and a similar proceeding as respects the titles marked F, will afford a
similar catalogue of the Croker collection of pamphlets on the French
Revolution. Classed indexes to the literature of any subject can be made
with equal facility, and as several copies of the catalogue will be
available for treatment in the manner suggested, they may be varied for
different objects, or to suit different systems of classification. For
all strictly Museum purposes it would suffice to paste the titles
excerpted on sheets of paper, but any of the indexes thus prepared might
be printed and published. The only difficulty or delay would arise from
the incorporation of the supplementary titles, which, as already
explained, will have been continually added during the printing of the
catalogue, and even this could be obviated by reprinting the entire
catalogue as suggested above.
These hints, imperfect as they are, should convince the reader that the
future of the Museum Catalogue, supposing the institution to be
maintained in its present condition of efficiency, will not be less
remarkable than its past. It will continue to make demands on the
liberality of successive generations, which will be the more readily met
the more the voluminous development of literature enforces the
conviction that, next to positive addition to the world's stock of
information, the most important service to culture is the preserving,
arranging, and rendering accessible the stores which the world already
possesses. The recovery of the catalogue of the Alexandrian Library, if
a less delightful, would probably be a more substantial gain to
knowledge than the recovery of any individual author. But what the
literature of the world is to the literature of ancient Greece, the
Catalogue of the British Museum is to that of the Alexandrian Library.
FOOTNOTES:
[87:1] _Universal Review_, October 1888.
[96:1] Soon after this was printed, three columns instead of one were
left blank, as the writer had recommended from the first.
THE BRITISH MUSEUM CATALOGUE AS THE BASIS OF A UNIVERSAL
CATALOGUE[109:1]
But little has of late been heard of the proposed Universal Catalogue of
Literature, which was a favourite subject of discussion some years ago.
The cause may partly be the loss of some like Sir Henry Cole and the
late lamented Mr. Ernest Thomas, who were especially interested in the
project; but must be mainly, I should think, the growing perception of
the difficulty of the undertaking. It could no doubt be performed by a
sufficiently numerous body of competent persons, working under efficient
control, guided by fixed rules, and influenced by such consideration in
the shape of salary and pension as to induce them to devote their lives
to it. There is not, however, the least probability of the endowment of
such a college of cataloguers. If the Universal Catalogue is ever to be
attained, we must submit to proceed by gradual approaches, and to be
content with something very far short of perfection in the execution of
the work. We must take the printed catalogue of that library which most
nearly approaches universality as a basis, and we must appeal to the
administrators of other libraries to supplement its deficiencies;
without insisting upon too rigid a uniformity of method, which could not
be enforced.
While the project for a Universal Catalogue has remained in suspense,
another catalogue has been silently growing up in print, far enough
indeed from universality, but approaching it more closely than any other
work of the kind. Commenced in 1881, and likely, if the Treasury grant
is continued, to be completed at or a little before the close of the
century, the printed Museum Catalogue will be the register of about a
million distinct publications. If its contents do not comprise a
majority of the books existing in the world, they undoubtedly comprise a
very great majority of the books which it is really important to
catalogue. My recommendation to those who desire to see a Universal
Catalogue—as all do in theory—is to accept this confessedly imperfect
catalogue as a temporary substitute, and labour to perfect it by the
co-operation of the principal libraries throughout the world, not by
reconstruction, which would introduce confusion and delay the
undertaking indefinitely, but by the simple addition of such books in
their possession as the Museum Catalogue does not embrace. This would
further involve the establishment of some central authority to edit
these accessions, either incorporated with the Museum Catalogue or
separately, as circumstances might prescribe.
Even the Museum Catalogue, however, is at present inadequate to provide
a basis for a Universal Catalogue, for the reason that it is in
comparatively few hands. If general co-operation towards perfecting it
is to be invited, it must be widely disseminated. It must be reprinted,
and distributed gratuitously to all important libraries. It is,
moreover, defective in its published form (not in the copy used in the
Reading Room), even as regards the contents of the Museum itself, on
account of the number of accession titles which will have been steadily
accumulating during the eighteen or nineteen years of its passage
through the press. A large portion of these have been absorbed during
the printing; an equal number, perhaps, are excluded by the publication
of the volume of catalogue before the appearance of the book. Letter B,
therefore, is more complete than A, C than B, and so on. From the point
of view of the Universal Catalogue, reprinting is thus an absolute
necessity. It should take place at the earliest practicable date after
the completion of the catalogue. The Government cannot be reasonably
expected to provide the funds without strong pressure from public
opinion, and it is partly in the hope of stimulating this opinion that I
have ventured these observations. But if the Universal Catalogue is to
be anything more than a fair vision, we must do more than stimulate
others, we must organise ourselves. We must know what libraries
throughout the civilised world would be ready, upon receiving a copy of
the republished Museum Catalogue, to supplement its deficiencies by
furnishing the titles of such of their own books as are not to be found
there. We must establish a central committee or committees to take
charge of such titles, to cancel the innumerable duplicates, to reduce
the others to approximate conformity with the rules on which the basis
catalogue has been executed. We must have learned to what extent
pecuniary assistance to small or over-worked libraries may be necessary,
and have considered how to provide it. We must have determined whether
the General Catalogue is to embrace that of the Museum or to be merely
supplementary, and in either case have framed some estimate of the
probable expense, and of the means of meeting it. We must have decided
some important questions, as, for instance, whether pamphlets,
newspapers, public documents, should be included, whether oriental
books, to what extent cross-references should be allowed, if admitted at
all. These points and many others cannot be settled without active
intercommunication among librarians, and when I consider the attendant
difficulties I own I am not sanguine that the project will have matured
by the time that the Museum Catalogue is in print.
When, however, the difficulties of organisation have been at length
overcome, when the Museum Catalogue is actually in the hands of the
directors of all important libraries, and the task of supplying its
deficiencies is being steadily prosecuted in a hundred different places;
when the editorial committee is fairly engaged upon its task of revision
and incorporation, and public sympathy has been fully enlisted, as would
ere long assuredly be the case, the record of the world's literature
which now may seem to many an utopian project, will have been brought
within reach. In thus carrying it out we should have effected an object
of still greater importance—the establishment of an universal literary
registry, whose developments and ramifications it is impossible to
predict. Such an institution is hardly likely to come into being without
the tangible inducement of an Universal Catalogue; and it is on this
account, quite as much as its own, that an Universal Catalogue is
desirable. The organisation created to effect it would not be allowed to
perish, but would be maintained for objects more important still. All
these possibilities, however, will remain but visions unless they are
based upon the firm ground of some actually existing catalogue, which
may serve as a stepping-stone to the ideal catalogue of the future.
_Cæteris paribus_, there can be no doubt that the biggest catalogue must
be the best, and it is on this ground, and not from any claim of
superiority of execution, that I venture to recommend the Museum
Catalogue as this necessary basis and stepping-stone, and to affirm that
the problem of making an Universal Catalogue will be greatly simplified
if it is conceived as the problem of supplementing the deficiencies of
the most extensive partial catalogue we possess at present. The subject
is one eminently suitable for consideration at this conference, which,
as the first ever held upon the Continent, possesses stronger claims to
an international character than any of its predecessors.
FOOTNOTES:
[109:1] Communicated to the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Library
Association, Paris, September 1892.
INTRODUCTION OF EUROPEAN PRINTING INTO THE EAST[115:1]
Speaking to-night as President of the Bibliographical Society, I have
found it necessary to select some point of bibliography as the subject
of my discourse. The subjects which profitably occupy the ordinary
meetings of the Society would not be appropriate to a numerous and
various assemblage like the present. Now that Internationalism and
Imperialism are in the air, and that the thoughts of the Queen's
home-bred subjects have perforce been carried far beyond the precincts
of their native isles, I have deemed that interest might be felt in a
brief retrospect of the first steps by which the most intellectually
valuable of all the arts was transplanted from Europe to the other
quarters of the Old World. American typography I leave to our visitors,
better qualified to treat it. I prefer no claim to originality, but
rather rest the utility of my paper upon the advantage of bringing to
one focus a number of facts hitherto scattered through a number of
books, and by consequence but partially known.
I have often thought that our reunion with our Aryan brethren of
Hindostan, when, after millenniums of separation, we Europeans returned
to them in the characters of travellers, merchants, and missionaries,
may be compared to the meeting of Jacob and Esau. As of old, the younger
brother had been the more prosperous. We brought them more precious
gifts than any we could receive from them, and among these was the art
of printing. But it was out of our power to bestow such a boon upon the
more numerous yellow race, for it already possessed it. China and Korea
too had been acquainted with printing for centuries, and not merely with
block printing, but with movable types. These, however, were rarely
employed, in consequence, I imagine, of the great extent and complexity
of the Chinese alphabet, or rather syllabarium; and it no more entered
into the head of a Chinese to print a foreign language than it occurred
to a Greek of the Roman Empire to translate a Latin book. Amazing
consequences would have followed if China would but have reformed her
alphabet and communicated her art to her neighbours. Had it but found
its way to Constantinople by the tenth century, we should have preserved
most of that lost classical literature for which, with much to encourage
and much to dispirit, we are now sifting the dust of Egyptian catacombs.
It does indeed appear from recent discoveries among the papyri of
Archduke Rainier that the Saracens of Egypt had grasped the principle of
block printing in the tenth century, probably from intercourse with
China. But this does but increase the wonder that they should have
merely struck off a few insignificant documents and carried the idea no
further.
Even when at length the art of printing became known in Europe, its
progress was for some time marvellously slow. For several years its
practice was confined to a single city, and this would probably have
continued still longer but for civil dissensions, which drove the
printers abroad. We need not be surprised, then, that it should have
been a hundred and six years after Gutenberg before any book proceeded
from a European press upon the continent of Asia; or, if we date from
the voyage of Vasco da Gama, now exactly four hundred years ago, we
shall see that sixty-four years, or two generations, elapsed before the
Portuguese conquerors gave a printing-press to India. There was probably
but little need for typography, either in the military or the civil
service; but in process of time another interest asserted itself—the
missionary. We shall find that the larger number of Spanish and
Portuguese books printed abroad, whether in America or in the East, were
designed for the conversion and instruction of the natives.
This was not, however, precisely the case with the first book printed in
India, or printed by Europeans in any part of the Old World outside of
Europe, although it was a religious book, "The Spiritual Compendium of
the Christian Life," by Gaspar de Leão, first Archbishop of Goa (Goa,
1561). The author had come out as Archbishop in 1560, and this book
appears to be either the full text or an abridgment of the sermons
preached by him in the visitation of his diocese in that year. It is
much to be hoped that a book so memorable for the circumstances of its
publication may be still extant; but Silva, in his Portuguese
bibliographical dictionary, does not, as he usually does when he can,
intimate the existence of a copy in the National Library of Lisbon or
elsewhere; nor does Martin Antonio Fernandes allude to the existence of
it, or any other of Archbishop Leão's writings at Goa, in the sermon
which he preached on the occasion of the translation of his remains in
1864. Archbishop Leão printed two other books at Goa—a tract against
the Jews, and another against the Mahometans; but these were posterior
to the second Goa book, a copy of which is in the British Museum—the
"Dialogues on Indian Simples and Drugs," by Garcia da Horta, printed at
Goa in 1563. This is a work of great merit, said to contain the first
account of Asiatic cholera. It is also remarkable as the first book in
which any production of Camoens was given to the world; for, although
the Lusian bard had written much, he had published nothing previous to
the appearance of a complimentary copy of verses to da Horta, prefixed
to this book. The Museum is, no doubt, indebted for its copy of this
very rare work to its founder, Sir Hans Sloane, for whom it would have
much interest. A Latin translation went through many editions, and the
original was reprinted in 1872.
Thirteen books are enumerated by Ribeiro dos Sanctos as having been
published at Goa up to 1655, and there were probably others of a merely
ephemeral character. The most interesting are a "Life of St. Peter in
Marathi," by Estevão da Cruz, 1634—if not a translation, perhaps the
first book, other than a catechism, written by a European in an Indian
vernacular; and the record of the proclamation of John IV. in 1641, when
Portugal recovered her independence. This book, which is in the British
Museum, indicates the lowest stage of typographical debasement, but is
interesting from its patriotic feeling.
Two Tamil books are said to have been printed by the Jesuits in 1577 and
1598 respectively, at Ambalakata, a place on the Malabar coast, probably
now ruined or known by some other name.
Before leaving India, I may mention a remarkable circumstance, not, so
far as I know, hitherto recorded in typographical history. It appears
from that marvellously interesting book, too soon interrupted, Mr.
Sainsbury's "Calendar of the Papers of the East India Company," that in
1624 the Shah of Persia, "having an earnest desire to bring into his
country the art of printing," was "very importunate" with the agents of
the Company at Ispahan, "to write for men skilful in the science, whom
he promises to maintain at his own charge." It does not appear that the
Company, who were then meditating the relinquishment of their Persian
branch as unprofitable, took any steps to fulfil the Shah's wishes, and
of course the casting of Oriental types in Persia, or their transport
thither, would have been very difficult undertakings. But the desire to
endow Persia with a printing-press nevertheless reflects the highest
honour upon the Shah, who was no less famous a person than Abbas the
Great.
From India we pass to China, and here an important discovery has been
made of late years. It has until very lately been universally believed
that the first book printed by Europeans in China was Eduardus de Sande,
"De Missione legatorum Japanensium ad Romanam Curiam" (Macao, 1590). My
friend, Señor José T. Medina, the Hercules and Lynceus of South American
bibliographers, has, however, found from the book itself that this
cannot be the case, for the writer of the preliminary address, Alexander
Valignanus, states that he has himself previously published at the same
place a book by Joannes Bonifacius, "De honesta puerorum institutione."
This must have appeared in 1589, if not sooner, and is undoubtedly the
first book printed by Europeans in China. Unfortunately it cannot be
produced, for it is not to be found. A copy may still be lurking in some
ancient library, and great will be his merit who brings it to light. It
may be mentioned that although the book "De Missione" principally
relates to Europe, and was compiled under the fiction of imaginary
conversations with the Japanese ambassadors (who really had visited
Europe and returned) for the information of the Japanese pupils of the
Jesuits, one chapter is an account of China for the benefit of European
readers. It is full of interest; and although its particulars have long
become common property, it would be well worth translating as a
contemporary account. Sande's book, it is needless to state, is of
exceeding rarity. It may be seen in a show-case in the King's library at
the British Museum, side by side with the very oldest South American
books.