LIBRARIES: World's Greatest

Duke Humfrey's Library, the oldest Reading Room
 at the Bodleian, in Oxford.

What are the greatest libraries in the world?

The head of the Bodleian at Oxford once said in a speech I attended that the five greatest libraries are in New York City (the New York Public Library), Washington, D.C. (the Library of Congress), London (the British Library), Oxford (the Bodleian), and Paris (the Bibliothèque Nationale). I have library cards for all five of these libraries.👍

Size. Wikipedia says, and I dispute, that the NY Public Library's 53 million books rank it the third-largest cataloged collection in the world after the Library of Congress (more than 160 million items) and the British Library (more than 150 million items). 

If Archives Canada in Ottawa is correctly listed as having 54 million volumes or items, then Ottawa ranks third and NYPL only fourth in the world in collection size – still not shabby for the NYPL. Russia (Moscow Library) is at 44 million items and France (Bibliothèque National) has 40 million items and therefore ranks 6th.

A spokesperson at the Library of Congress told me when I visited in 2016 that libraries disagree on how to count items other than book volumes. The British Library allegedly counts some individual stamps as items equivalent to a book, whereas the Library of Congress combines stamps into albums.

Usability. I would rank the Weston Library, the main reading room of the Bodleian, as the most accessible, followed by the NY Public Library main building, behind the two lions (http://bit.ly/2v75Ru4). The NY Public Library is surely the most used, with annual visitors of 10-18 million (depending on how you count). In second place, at 1.7 million people per year, are the British Library and Library of Congress.

To my mind there is no question that the Bibliothèque Nationale is the most difficult of the five greatest libraries to use, certainly for someone pressed for time. The first day at this library is consumed by paperwork and walking from place to place through fortress-like gates and passageways. It may have just been my bad luck, but I don't think so. have commented on this (http://bit.ly/2vsGFiW.)

Most Beautiful. Two sites seem to focus on the sheer beauty of the libraries. One list is at booking.com, which posts a list of great libraries of the world (https://booki.ng/2vsb8gV) in the hope that you will book a tour of them! Two of the libraries on their list are among the great libraries of the world I have listed above, the Bodleian and the New York Public Library. The three World-Class Libraries that are missing from their list are the Library of Congress (oversight!), the British Library (oversight!) and the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The other list of the most beautiful libraries is by a Huffington Post writer (http://bit.ly/1ejQixl). It includes only one of the five great world-class libraries, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which is (yes) a great collection, but, as I have noted, can be a nightmare to try to use. So I take it that this list is for looking at the architecture and not the contents.

LIBRARIES: Why Anglophones Are Tops

Bodleian, Oxford (Weston Library). Reader goes to
desk, then admissions at right. Card admits to stacks via
 readers' door at left. Easy-peasy. Photos by JT Marlin.

I have previously noted that four of the five  great libraries in the world are in the UK or USA:

• Oxford's Bodleian (the only university library).
• The British Library in London near St. Pancras Station.
• The Library of Congress on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.
• The New York Public Library in Mid-Manhattan, branches throughout NYC.

The rest of the world is represented by one library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris.

Why might it be that four of the five great libraries are in anglophone countries?

I think Gutenberg's moveable-type printing press was especially adapted to the heirs to the Greco-Roman language because the European languages are phonetic and based on a relatively small number of component letters. Chinese characters are more complicated and were harder to convert to mechanical printing (computers have made it much easier). Korean and Japanese phonetic characters were relatively late arrivals.

Within Europe, Italy and Germany had common languages but were not unified until the 19th century and therefore didn't have a strong national center for storing and making accessible books.

Bottom line, the major factor seems to be the high degree of literacy and the policy decisions made in the USA and UK to make available free libraries, following the success of philanthropic initiatives along these lines.

I'm a big user of the four USA and UK libraries. A month rarely goes by when I am not in one of them or consulting their resources online. Only one is a university library, the Bodleian. It and the British library receive registration copies of all new published books (as do other UK libraries). The Library of Congress is the singular depository of copyrighted books in the USA, but in usage the NY Public Library has nearly ten times the number of visitors of any other library in the world.

Bibliothèque nationale. Line up. Be ready to wait, then walk,
a lot. Allow a day for orientation. Rely on staff; don't dare to try to
figure anything out on your own because you can't, as you will find
out within a few minutes. Don't expect fast delivery of books.

My main comment on the difference between the four US and UK libraries and the Bibliothèque Nationale is that one could go into any of the four anglo libraries and generally find something on one's own, without requiring high-level support.

The BnF, however, is built like a fortress to protect its books and without help from the skilled staff  one could be lost inside forever.

I have provided at top a photo of what one faces on one's first visit to Oxford's Bodleian Library (Weston building). The inquiry desk is designed essentially to shuttle you into Admissions at right or admit you to the stacks at left. End of story.

At right is my photo of what one faces as ones first introduction to the BnF. The nice murals and indirect lighting don't veil the message that one is in the hands of bureaucracy from here on, and get used to it. One is given chairs to wait in and you take a number. Then you fill out paperwork. Then you are given instructions for your long walks to the vestiaire, the place where you will sit, the place where your books are, and the place where you order them. These places in my case were widely scattered:

Daily tickets.

• When I first arrived, I walked through several doors that were like submarine or space ship interlocks, and then down a cavernous escalator. The books I needed were at the other end of the huge BnF plaza, a walk I feel sure was a quarter-mile long.
• I had to go back to the admission office because somehow I as a reader had been misclassified by the Bureau of Accréditation. I still have no clue what the problem was but the classification is a matter of highest importance to everyone in the library and the fact that I didn't care was of zero interest to anyone.
• So on my first day at the library, I must have walked a full mile inside the library, from one office to another and back again. As Gen. Pierre Bosquet said of the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."
• I was looking for books on French heraldry and found a gap in the books on the shelves. There was no explanation on the shelf for the gap. I went to the desk and they advised me that all the heraldry books were filed together in the middle of the aisle, some distance from the shelves where the number order would suggest they would be located. I started to point out the difficulty posed to a visitor so that it could be fixed, until, as I talked, it dawned on me that the difficulty was built into the library. I was simply exposing to ridicule my simple Anglo-Saxon peasant mind, which tries to make things efficient and ignores the impact on the work place, the Code du Travail [http://nyti.ms/2wvvanC]. So I interrupted myself 🙊and decided to go with the flow. Just don't expect things to be in the right order and instead appreciate the ancient régime way the BnF provides special status for their armes.
• I think you need to buy a new ticket every day you enter the BnF. They provide three of them gratuits. I don't pretend to understand where or when you produce these tickets. I hope I never have to find out.

THERESA MAY: Time at Oxford (Updated Oct. 29, 2016)

Calling Sherlock.

Theresa May was born Oct. 1, 1956 in Eastbourne, Sussex, only child of Zaidee Mary Barnes (1928–1982) and Hubert Brasier (1917–1981).

Her father was a Church of England clergyman who was chaplain of an Eastbourne hospital and later vicar of the Church of St Mary the Virgin at Wheatley, near Oxford. 

May was educated primarily in the state sector but with a short spell at an independent Catholic school. At 13, she won a place at the former Holton Park Girls' Grammar School. She then attended Oxford where she studied geography at St Hugh's, graduating in 1977.

The current issue of Private Eye has a lead story about gossip writers trying find out about Mrs May’s time at Oxford. A potential source was a campaign pamphlet of 45 pages written by undergraduate  David Blair to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA, founded 1924). The source is believed to include self-serving articles for and against notables such as William Hague, Daniel Hannan, Jeremy Hunt and Sally Ullman (later Bercow).

Postscript 1, Aug. 11, 2016

The British Library, according to Ian Senior, has no copy in its catalog but the Bodleian and Trinity College allegedly do. Both these copies were reportedly searched for and found missing. Lord Gnome of Private Eye was correct in his report that no dirt about the undergraduate lives of Theresa (nee Brasier) and Philip May was to be found in the 1994 History of the Oxford University Conservative Association by David Blair. But he was entirely wrong when he asserted that a rare copy of this slender volume had "mysteriously gone missing" from the Trinity College Archive. The only mystery is why no one from Private Eye thought to check this erroneous detail by means of a email to Clare Hopkins, Trinity College Archivist.

Postscript 2, Oct. 29, 2016

I have since visited with Clare Hopkins in Oxford and have seen the 1994 History of OUCA. It is a slim volume indeed and I could personally add a lot of detail about the years 1962-65. There is nothing in it about the Oxford activities of Theresa May.

HERALDRY: Simple and Fun

The Earl Marshal (Duke of Norfolk) is the English
authority on arms, and his Court at the College
of Arms decides disputes. In Scotland, it is Lord
Lyon King of Arms. [All illustrations from the
1953 book, Simple Heraldry].

As a relative newcomer to the heraldry field, bitten by the bug less than ten years ago, earlier this year (in February and September) I was haunting heraldry collections in Oxford and London, such as:

• the Bodleian's newly reopened Weston Library with small open-stack collection of useful books, 
• the British Library's huge collection, easily accessible, 
• the College of Arms library, which sadly in February I could not consult because it was being renovated, and 
• the Society of Genealogists, which I have joined; it has a decent collection and is well-staffed with paid and unpaid experts on hand.

The genealogy and local history room at the New York Public Library is disappointing because the stacks that are open are strong on local history but not on heraldry.

The book that best fits my attitude toward heraldry – that it is loads of fun, Tolkien on steroids – is Simple Heraldry Cheerfully Illustrated, by Iain Moncreiffe (Falkland Poursuivant) and Don Pottinger (Herald Painter Extraordinary to the Court of Lord Lyon). My first copy was given to me by Paul Walton (Brasenose College, Oxford). I have since acquired a second copy online.

The book takes a light-hearted approach to its subject while it gets everything, so far as my amateur scan can determine, right. In other words, the style is like 1066 and All That, but the content is non-fiction.

Simple Heraldry is not a book of recent vintage. In fact it is 62 years old – if it were an American citizen, the book could get in line for a national pension, although the penalties for early withdrawal suggest that the book should wait a little longer before applying for its monthly direct deposit.

The publisher is Edinburgh-based Thomas Nelson and Sons, founded 1798 and now a subsidiary of HarperCollins. The last edition on record is 1955, being a reprint of the original edition.

Note the Moray or Murray arms – three stars argent on
a field azure. The main difference with the Douglas
arms is that for Douglas the azure is in chief only
and the stars are three in a row.

Its age shows up on p. 62, where it reports that

you may apply to the Earl Marshal through the College of Arms for Letters Patent granting you special arms of your own. This costs £105...

In February, Windsor Herald told me that the cost for an individual was now £5,500. The cost is higher for institutions like nonprofits and local governments. It is highest for large businesses.

What Blazon are You? What a
blazon is, from Simple Heraldry.

Two copies of the book were available second hand online via Amazon for $35 each – a bargain.

I purchased one of them instantly. So there is one left. The book is underpriced.

Comment

This is just the kind of self-mocking book to rekindle more interest in heraldry. It should be updated and reissued. If someone knows what the status of the rights is, please contact me at john[at]boissevainbooks.com.