Does it come of being raised in a bookstore?

When I was about four or so, the local paper photographed me beside the duckpond behind our public library*. (I think it was a very, very local paper.) Even when I am not feeding the ducks, I love ugly libraries. It may be nothing more than nostalgia for that first public library, but I love the cosy embrace of a building that clearly exists for the sole purpose of giving me books and comfy chairs in which to read them. I can read the most appallingly clunky prose and revel in the most disappointingly predictable plots, as long as I'm in an ugly public library, curled up in an aged chair that is beginning to spew its stuffing. That's not to say that I don't appreciate the lovely St. Pancras reading rooms at the British Library. (All right, the photo shows the cafe area and the King's Library in the background, but you get the idea.) The BL is one of my favourite libraries to work in - well-lit (as opposed to Duke Humfrey's, I'm sorry to say), airy and inviting, not to mention being the home of a rather important collection of manuscripts - but there's an undeniable allure about an ugly library, like an itch that must be scratched: There must be good books inside, if it's ugly.

On the other hand, we have in this day and age (O tempora o mores) libraries that do not live in buildings at all. I, for example, still swoon every time I sit at my computer and load images of my most cherished manuscript, MS 201 of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Thanks to the generosity of the Parker Library on the Web project and the member of my committee who suggested that I send them a grant proposal, I have access to the stunning digital images of Matthew Parker's manuscript collection. The folks at ParkerWeb have been extraordinarily kind in loading to the test site a number of MSS I requested for my project, but ParkerWeb is not by any stretch of the imagination the same as the Parker Library that lives in that peaceful, green-walled room in Cambridge.

The books themselves are different, too, which seems fitting for a collection originally amassed by someone like Parker, who couldn't seem to stop manhandling and reconfiguring his books. At Kalamazoo this year, I heard someone say that we ought to put images of charters on the internet so that people could get a sense of the scale and materiality of the documents. I will be honest with you and say that this completely bowled me over because the whole time I'm transcribing from even the amazing images on ParkerWeb, I'm nevertheless irked by my inability to touch them and to read from the pages. (I think a computer screen is harder on the eyes, no matter how small the script.) Nor does ParkerWeb allow me to collate a manuscript or to get a sense of the size of the book, except as it is represented in the form of a ruler photographed beside the manuscript.

That is a fairly obvious way in which the books I read on ParkerWeb differ from the ones I read in the Parker Library, but what does it mean when the sequence of folios changes in the imaging process? Last week, I discovered that one folio of CCCC 201 appeared twice in the digital version, replacing in one instance a folio that contained a similar rubric. When I wrote to inquire, I learned that it was not simply a question of a mistaken link on the website and that the image of the duplicated page in fact appeared twice in their underlying data set. Page 82 does not exist in the digital CCCC 201 on any level, at least it will not exist until the reshoots are over and the final set of images is sent to Stanford. A truly Parkerian alteration.

According to my argument in the chapter I am currently working (read, struggling) to revise, this must mean that I and the others involved in the project are participating in a diachronic textual community with Parker and with his Anglo-Saxon predecessors. If the books invited later engagement, Parker was not the man to shy away from that invitation. Nor, it seems, are we, and like him, we are busy using our selective power to re-form libraries and books for different ends. The difference is that we are doing it without altering the physical forms of the books as shaped by Parker.

This all sounds very fine, but even if I have embraced the rhetoric of community and fluidity, I will always be a sucker for the tangible artefact. There is nothing like a grubby book I can hold in my hands inside an ugly, ugly library. Especially if there are ducks.



*I looked up the library's website to find out if I was remembering the location aright (next to Burgess Park, along the train tracks), and I am now enchanted by the stained glass pictured there. It is called "The Jewel of Menlo Park," but I know nothing else about it, except that it reminds me a bit of "View of Oyster Bay."