Books - by Sue Purkiss

About a year ago, I started volunteering in the library at Wells Cathedral. This is no ordinary library. It dates from the fifteenth century, when, in 1424, Bishop Bubwith left money in his will for a library, to be built above the East Cloister. The library opened in 1458.

There were already books at the cathedral before this. Wells was what is called, rather oddly, a 'secular' cathedral: that is, it had no monastery or abbey attached, so there was no scriptorium where monks laboured to produce the exquisite illuminated volumes of which, I imagine, we are all aware. But there was a school, and there was a community of clerics, and they needed books to study. So the books came from elsewhere - they were not produced in the cathedral itself.

The west front of Wells Cathedral. My totally unbiased view is that it is one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world.

These volumes were large, heavy, and valuable. They were kept safely locked away in wooden boxes - they were certainly not readily available to all. But by the fifteenth century, the collections of books - in cathedrals and in the two universities - had grown, and more space was needed both to store them and to study them. And so people saw the need for libraries.

As it was built above a cloister - a passageway on one side of a quadrangle - Bishop Bubwith's library is long and realatively narrow. About a third of it is devoted to books dating from 1800 on. The older books are looked tantalisingly away behind an iron gate: you can gaze, but you can't touch! (Though you can go on a special tour, when you can see these wonderful volumes at close hand. It's fascinating, and worth every penny.) You will see that the books on the shelves closest to you are chained to the shelves, which may remind many of you of the library at the Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books - presided over by an orang-utan, and home to books so dangerous that they have to be chained. Libraries began to use shelves and bookcases as the numbers of books increased - which they did particularly with the invention of printing (in about 1455, by Gutenberg in Germany).

The Chained Library

These books were chained because they were precious. But paradoxically, although they were chained to the shelves, this made them actually more accessible: clerics could come to the library, take down the books and look at them on the shelf provided - which was a distinct improvement on having to persuade someone to let you into a locked chest to consult a particular volume.

The books which are in the Chained Library now are not the books which were there originally. Unfortunately, during the reign of the arch-vandal Henry VIII, his enforcer, Thomas Cromwell, was the lay Dean at Wells. If he hadn't been, the library may well have been left alone - cathedrals generally didn't suffer the same fate as monasteries and abbeys - but as he was, he was aware of the collection, and he confiscated the lot on the grounds that they were Catholic texts. They left Wells, never to return, and the collection had to be built up again from scratch. Many books were given or bequeathed to the library over the years by a variety of benefactors - and as a result, the collection is very varied - it doesn't just consist of theological works.

I'm very gradually learning more about the library and the books within it. And that strange thing is happening - whereby when you start to take notice of a particular topic, the universe helps you out, and draws to your attention all sorts of relevant things. So, for instance, the other day I began to read a book I'd had for some time, called The Bookseller's Tale, by Martin Latham. It mentions one Christine de Pizan, a contemporary of our Bishop Bubwith. She was Venetion by birth, but lived at the French court - and she worked there: she was a professional writer - with surely a strong claim to have been the first professional woman of letters in Europe. Absolutely fascinating - and lo and behold, the next day, Lucy Worsley put up a post on Facebook about her - and about an exhibition at the British Library, called Mediaeval Women, starting today and running till March - which features an actual book of Christine's.

I also read this week about another centuries-old book. This one is a bejewelled prayer book, which was featured in a portrait by Holbein of  Thomas Cromwell - that same Cromwell who pinched all our books. This prayer book - the actual same one! - has recently been unearthed in a forgotten corner of a Cambridge University library.

Holbein's portrait of Cromwell, with the recently rediscovered prayer book.

Which brings me to my final point. A few days ago, I went to a talk by Professor Adam Smyth, of Balliol College, Oxford. It was about his new book, The Bookmakers, which tells the story of printing through eighteen lives - and not necessarily the most obvious lives. It was absolutely fascinating, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the book. Someone asked him what he thought about digitally produced books. He said he didn't himself own a Kindle, but - diplomatically - that he could see circumstances in which one would be very useful. But, he pointed out: it's 600 years since Gutenberg first printed a copy of the Bible - and copies of that Bible still exist. You can touch them, smell them - read them. Will the same be said of books published on Kindle in 600 years' time?

Adam Smyth and his book.

A remarkable thing, the book.