1b - The early modern library (to c. 1640)

Summary

Before we proceed to discuss developments in the physical setting of libraries from the later fifteenth century onwards it is worth clarifying the different names used for different types of book shelving, as the terminology in contemporary records is not consistent. In what follows I use ‘lectern’ to describe a sloping desk, often double-sided, with a shelf or shelves below it. A ‘stall’ is, here, a lectern that has shelves superimposed on it at a later date. A ‘press’ is a shelved cupboard, and a ‘bookcase’ is the familiar upright shelving of today, often standing in pairs back to back.

The lectern libraries, as we have seen, were seldom capable of accommodating, and were indeed never intended to accommodate, an institution’s entire book holdings, and certainly seem often to have been built or first furnished with no idea of expansion. What we know of Leicester Abbey in the late fifteenth century was very likely true of other libraries, and it was certainly so from the early sixteenth century. Neil Ker notes, of the necessity of laying books flat and in piles, that ‘almost certainly books were piled thus “subitus”, below the desks, during the sixteenth century, in the crowded libraries built originally to house manuscripts and receiving now a flood of printed books’.

The ‘public’ university libraries founded to provide access to key texts for poor scholars were no longer a sufficient resource as both the nature of books and the manner of studying them evolved. Nevertheless, lectern libraries continued to be set up well into the second half of the sixteenth century, as witness the case of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, discussed below. Why and how did these lectern libraries survive for so long?