banana research
bat binding
boots and shoes in art
chickens in religion and folklore
sewage: collected works
It is as if the contents of the books matter less to these organizers than the uniqueness of the subject under which they are catalogued, so that a library becomes a collection of thematic anthologies. Certainly, the subjects or categories into which a library is divided not only change the nature of the books it contains (read or unread) but also, in turn, are changed by them. To place Robert Musil's novels in a section on Austrian Literature circumscribes his work by nationalistic definitions of novel-writing; at the same time, it illuminates neighbouring sociological and historical works on the Austro- Hungarian Empire by expanding their restrictive scholarly views on the subject. Inclusion of Anton Chekhov's Strange Confession in the section of Detective Novels forces the reader to follow the story with the requisite attention to murder, clues and red herrings; it also opens the notion of the crime genre to authors such as Chekhov, not usually associated with the likes of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie. If I place Tomas Eloy Martinez's Santa Evita in my section on Argentinian History do I diminish the book's literary value? If I place it under Fiction in Spanish am I dismissing its historical accuracy?
Sir Robert Cotton, an eccentric seventeenth-century English bibliophile, ranged his books (which included many rare manuscripts, such as the only known manuscript of Beowulf, and the Lindisfarne Gospels, from about a.d. 698) in twelve bookcases, each adorned with the bust of one of the first twelve Caesars. When the British Library acquired some of his collection, it kept Cotton's strange cataloguing system, so that the Lindisfarne Gospels can today be requested as "Cotton MS. Nero D. IV" because it was once the fourth book on the fourth shelf down in the bookcase topped by the bust of Nero.40
And yet order of almost any kind has the merit of containing the uncontainable. "There is probably many an old collector," G.K. Chesterton observed, "whose friends and relations say that he is mad on Elzevirs, when as a matter of fact it is the Elzevirs that keep him sane. Without them he would drift into soul-destroying idleness and hypochondria; but the drowsy regularity of his notes and calculations teaches something of the same lesson as the swing of the smith's hammer or the plodding of the ploughman's horses, the lesson of the ancient commonsense of things."41 The ordering of a collection of thrillers, or of books printed by Elzevir, grants the manic behaviour of the collector a certain degree of sanity. At times I feel as if the exquisite pocket-sized leather- bound Nelsons, the flimsy Brazilian booklets known as literatura de cordel (because they were sold by hawkers who strung their wares on thin cords), the early editions of the Septimo Circulo detective series edited by Borges and Bioy Casares, the small square volumes of the New Temple Shakespeare published by Dent and illustrated with wood engravings by Eric Gill—all these books that I sporadically collect—have kept me sane.
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Several examples of literatura de cordel.
The broader the category, the less circumscribed the book. In China, at the beginning of the third century, the books in the Imperial Library were kept under four modest and comprehensive headings agreed upon by eminent court scholars—canonical or classical texts, works of history, philosophical works, and miscellaneous literary works—each bound in a specific and symbolic colour, respectively green, red, blue and grey (a chromatic division curiously akin to that of the early Penguins or the Spanish Coleccion Austral). Within these groupings, the titles were shelved following graphic or phonetic order- ings. In the first case, many thousands of characters were broken into a few basic elements—the ideogram for earth or water, for instance—and then placed in a conventional order that followed the hierarchies of Chinese cosmology. In the second, the order was based on the rhyme of the last syllable of the last word in a title. Equivalent to the Roman alphabetical system, which fluctuates between 26 (English) and 28 (Spanish) letters, the number of possible rhymes in Chinese varied between 76 and 206. The largest manuscript encyclopedia in the world, the Yongle Dadian, or Monumental Compendium from the Era of Eternal Happiness, commissioned in the fifteenth century by the Emperor Chengzu with the purpose of recording in one single publication all existing Chinese literature, used the rhyming method to order its thousands of entries. Over two thousand scholars worked on the ambitious enterprise. Only a small portion of that monstrous catalogue survives today.42
Entering a library, I am always struck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order. Some categories, of course, are more evident than others, and Chinese libraries in particular have a long history of classification that reflects, in its variety, the changing ways in which China has conceived the universe. The earliest catalogues follow the hierarchy imposed by a belief in the supreme rule of the gods, beneath whose primordial, all-encompassing vault—the realm of the heavenly bodies—stands the subservient earth. Then, in decreasing order of importance, come human beings, animals, plants and, lastly, minerals. These six categories govern the divisions under which the works of 596 authors, preserved in 13,269 scrolls, are classified in the first-century bibliographic study known as the Hanshu Yiwen\hi, or Dynastic History of the Han, an annotated catalogue
One of the volumes of the monumental Yongle Dadian encyclopedia.
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based on the research of two imperial librarians, Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin,43 who, alone, dedicated their lives to recording what others had written. Other Chinese catalogues stem from different hierarchies. The Cefu Yuangui, or Archives ofthe Divinatory Tortoise, compiled by imperial command between 1005 and 1013, follows not a cosmic order but rather a bureaucratic one, beginning with the emperor and descending through the various state officials and institutions down to lowly citizens.44 (In Western terms, we could conceive of a library of English literature that began, for instance, with the Prayers and Poems of Elizabeth 1 and ended with the complete works of Charles Bukowski.) This bureaucratic or sociological order was employed to assemble one of the first Chinese encyclopedias to call itself exhaustive: the Taiping Yulan, or Imperial Readings from the Era ofthe Great Peace. Finished in 982, it explored all fields of knowledge; its sequel, Vast Compendium from the Era of the Great Peace, covered under fifty-five subject-headings more than five thousand biographical entries, and listed over two thousand titles. Song Taizong, the emperor who commanded its writing, is said to have read three chapters a day for one whole year. A more complex ordering system appears in what is known as the largest encyclopedia ever printed: the Qinding Gujin Tushu Jicheng, or Great Illustrated Imperial Encyclopedia of Past and Present Times, of 1726, a gigantic biographical library divided into more than ten thousand sections. The work was attributed to Jiang Tingxi, a court proofreader who used wooden blocks with cut-out pictures and movable characters specially designed for the enterprise. Each section of the encyclopedia covers one specific realm of human concern, such as Science or Travel, and is divided into subsections containing biographical entries. The section on Human Relations, for instance, lists the biographies of thousands of men and women according to their occupation or position in society, among them sages, slaves, playboys, tyrants, doctors, calligraphers, supernatural beings, great drinkers, notable archers and widows who did not marry again.45