But a reader's ambition knows no bounds. A century later, the vizier Abul-Qasim al-Maghribi, dissatisfied with what he deemed to be an incomplete work, composed a Complement to the Catalogue of al-Nadim that extended the already inconceivable repertory to an even more astonishing length. The volumes listed in this exaggerated catalogue were likewise, of course, never collected in one place.
Looking for more practical ways to find their path through a maze of books, Arab librarians often allowed themes and disciplines to override the strictures of the alphabetical system and to impose subject divisions on the physical space itself. Such was the library visited towards 980 by a contemporary of al-Nadim, the distinguished doctor Abou Ali El-Hossein Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. Paying a visit to his patient the Sultan of Bukhara, in what is today Uzbekistan, Avicenna discovered a library conveniently divided into scholarly subjects of all sorts. "I entered a building of many rooms," he tells us.
In each room there were chests full of books, piled one on top of the other. In one room were poetry books in Arabic, in another books of law, and so forth; each room was given over to books of one specific science. I consulted the catalogue of Ancient Works [i.e., Greek] and asked the librarian, keeper of the live memory of the books, for what I wanted. I saw books whose very titles are for the most part unknown, books I had never seen before and which I have never seen since. I read these books and I profited from them, and I was able to recognize each one's position inside its proper scientific category.54
These thematic divisions were commonly used together with the alphabetical system in the Islamic Middle Ages. The subjects themselves varied, as did the place in which the books were kept, whether open shelves, closed cupboards or (as in the case of the Bukhara Library) wooden chests. Only the category of sacred books—the Koran, in a variety of copies—was always kept separate, since the word of God is not to be mixed with the word of men.
The cataloguing methods of the Library of Alexandria, with its space organized according to the letters of the alphabet and its books subjected to hierarchies imposed by the selected bibliographies, reached far beyond the borders of Egypt. Even the rulers of Rome created libraries in Alexandria's image. Julius Caesar, who had lived in Alexandria and had certainly frequented the Library, sought to establish in Rome "the finest possible public library," and charged Marcus Terence Varro (who had written an unreliable handbook of library science, quoted approvingly by Pliny) "to collect and classify all manner of Greek and Latin books."55 The task was not carried out until after Caesar's death; in the first years of the reign of Augustus, Rome 's first public library was opened by Asinius Pollio, a friend of Catullus, Horace and Virgil. It was housed in the so- called Atrium of Freedom (its exact location has not yet been established) and decorated with portraits of famous writers.
Roman libraries like that of Asinius Pollio, specially designed to suit the learned reader in spite of names such as "Atrium of Freedom," must have felt powerfully like a place of containment and order. The earliest remains we have of such a library were unearthed on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Because Roman book collections such as Pollio's were bilingual, architects had to design in duplicate the buildings housing them. The Palatine ruins, for instance, reveal one chamber for Greek works and one for works in Latin, each with openings for statues and deep niches for wooden bookcases (armaria), while the walls appear to have been lined with shelves and protected by doors. The armaria were labelled and their codes inscribed in the catalogues next to the titles of the books they contained. Flights of stairs allowed readers to reach the different thematic areas and, since some of the shelves were higher than arm's length, portable steps were available for those who required them. A reader would have picked up the desired scroll, aided perhaps by the cataloguing librarian, and unfurled it on one of the tables in the middle of the room, to examine it in the midst of a communal mumbling, in the days before silent reading became common, or carried it out and read it under the colonnade, as was customary in the libraries of Greece.56
But this is only guesswork. The single depiction we have of a Roman library derives from a line drawing, made in the nineteenth century, of a relief from the Augustan period found in Neumagen, Germany, and now lost.57 It shows the scrolls lying in tiers of three on deep shelves, probably in alphabetical order within their subject section, their triangular identifying tags clearly visible to the reader, who is stretching his right arm towards them. Unfortunately, the titles on the tags cannot be read. As in any library I visit, I am curious to know what the books are, and even here, faced with the image of an image of a long-vanished collection, my eyes peer into the drawing, trying to make out the names of those ancient scrolls.
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiplies seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts. Whether in
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Engraving copied from a no longer extant Roman bas-relief, depicting the method for storing scrolls.
Alexandria, Baghdad or Rome, this expanding mass of words eventually requires systems of classification that allow it space to grow, movable fences that save it from being restricted by the limits of the alphabet or rendered useless by the sheer quantity of items it might hold under a categorical label.
Numbers seem perhaps better suited than letters or subject-headings to maintain order in this unstoppable growth. Even in the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys realized that, to allow for this surfeit, the infinite universe of numbers was more efficient than the alphabet, and he enumerated his volumes for his "easy finding them to read."58 The numerical classification I remember from my visits to the school library (and the one most widely used throughout the world) is Dewey's, which lends the spines
Portrait of Melvil Dewey.
of books the aspect of licence plates on rows of parked cars.
Melvil Dewey's story is a curious combination of a generous vision and narrow views. In 1873, while still a student at Amherst College, Massachusetts (where he soon after became acting librarian), the twenty-two- year-old Dewey realized the need for a system of classification that would combine both common sense and practicality. He disliked arbitrary methods, such as that of the New York State Library he had frequented, by which books were arranged alphabetically but "paying no attention to subjects," and so he set himself the task of conceiving a better system. "For months I dreamed night and day that there must be somewhere a satisfactory solution," he wrote fifty years later. "One Sunday during a long sermon . . . the solution flasht over me so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting 'Eureka!' Use decimals to number a classification of all human knowledge in print."59
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Following the subject divisions of earlier scholars, Dewey ambitiously divided the vast field of "all human knowledge in print" into ten thematic groups, and then assigned to each group one hundred numbers which in turn were broken down into a further ten, allowingfor a progression ad infinitum. Religion, for instance, received the number 200; the Christian Church, the number 260; the Christian God, the number 264.60 The advantage of what became known as the Dewey Decimal Classification System is that, in principle, each division can be subjected to countless further divisions. God himself can suffer being broken down into his attributes or his avatars, and each attribute and each avatar can undergo yet another fragmentation. That Sunday in church, young Dewey discovered a method of great simplicity and effectiveness that allowed for the huge measure of its task. "My heart is open to anything that's either decimal or about libraries," he once confessed.61