The Book Thieves and I

I have — as far as I know — only made the acquaintance of one book thief. I do not include those students who illicitly ‘borrow’ books from the famously non-lending Bodleian in this count. I remember when I was a doctoral student, a fellow graduate casually mentioning that he had called up a thesis but could not be bothered to read it in the library so smuggled it out wrapped up in his jumper in order to photocopy it in its entirety; he later returned it. I found this all the more shocking because he had removed, albeit temporarily, an unpublished dissertation, the number of copies of which would be in single digits. I was more ambivalent a few years later about the student of mine who came for confession: in September 1997, he had wanted to use the Bodleian at the weekend only to discover it was to close on what he — and I — considered the spurious grounds of respecting the funeral of the former Princess of Wales. He had selected the book he wanted to study, removed it on the Friday and returned it on the Monday. Should he have been praised for his determination to read or condemned for breaking the library’s rules?

Those examples do not compare with actual campaigns of book-stealing. The one thief I have met was an academic who stole from Oxford and London libraries, and then sold them to auctioneers and dealers in the capital, claiming that he had inherited them from a late relative. A wise librarian called John eventually uncovered his deeds. The man was arrested and served time in prison. He is now, I believe, a radio presenter.

There is a detail of this case that came back to me last weekend, when I was reading The Financial Times‘ feature on book-stealing. John, the librarian, told me that the police had recovered some of the books from under the thief’s bed. He had hidden them there because he had to remove signs of their former, or rightful, ownership. He did not tear off the front boards, as some thieves do, or tear out pages with provenance marks. Instead, he spent his evenings painstakingly washing away the book-plates in the front of the volumes. John particularly remarked on this: the thief had done it as ‘a labour of love’, a sign of respect for the books he had purloined.

What brought this back to me was reading of the case of Stanislas Gosse, the young Alsatian who stole hundreds of volumes, including manuscripts, from the Mont Sainte-Odile monastery in Alsace. At his trial in 2003, he explained , or exculpated, his actions: ‘It may appear selfish, but I felt the books had been abandoned. They were covered with dust and pigeon droppings and I felt no one consulted them any more’. Like the thief I knew, he respected what he stole.

The Financial Times parallelled Gosse with a more recent thief, Farhad Hakimzadeh, who (in a line which is surely to become notorious) loved his books so much, he spent his wedding night in their company. But Hakimzadeh did not simply steal volumes and maps: he sliced pages out of them. For sure, he did it clinically, so much so that The Guardian reported at the time ‘to the untrained eye the damage is barely visible’. However, it was damage and it was vandalism. It seems to me that there is a different impulse at work in Hakimzadeh’s actions from Gosse’s.

What Gosse did has been written up as bibliokleptomania. Whether it was in truth an uncontrollable desire as this designation would suggest, we are not competent to judge, though it makes a handy defence in court. Indeed, the description of both his motivation and that of Hakimzadeh is suspect, coming as they do from their trials. But Gosse’s phrasing struck me as remarkably familiar, unintentionally echoing the words of a humanist at work nearly six hundred years earlier.

Readers of these pages will have met my friend, Poggio Bracciolini, before. One of his claims to renown in scholarly circles is his recovery of classical texts that had not circulated in the centuries immediately before his lifetime. In one famous letter, he describes how he and colleagues (no solitary activity, this) visited the monastery of St. Gall and ‘there amid a tremendous quantity of books which it would take too long to describe, we found Quintilian still safe and sound, though filthy with mould and dust. For these books were not in the library, as befitted their worth, but in a sort of foul and gloomy dungeon at the bottom of one of the towers, where not even men convicted of a capital offence would have been stuck away’. Like Gosse, the humanists claimed that the owners had abandoned their books — respecting those volumes meant disrespecting the institutions that housed them.

Poggio and his colleagues would claim, 0f course, that what they were doing was not like Gosse’s actions because they would not admit to it being selfish. On the contrary, they insisted that they were acting in the interests of the republic of letters, not trying to hoard books but to make their texts available to the learned. The audience, it might be said, was select and hardly a wide public but their self-justification was much more bullish than a latterday defendant’s.

It also seems to me that the humanist impulse was at work a century after Poggio, in the early sixteenth century here in Oxford, when the old university library entered a period of decline. As it did, some of the manuscripts went missing from the chained library. Once again, those thefts might have been rationalised by their perpetrators as acts for the public good, saving venerable manuscripts from an institution incapable of caring for them properly. And, in a few cases, those books now survive because they were stolen.

In short, as I said in a lecture a couple of years ago, it is not only bad men who steal books. Nor is it the case that all thefts at all times have been considered heinous. The historians among us need to consider the shifting boundaries between safeguarding and appropriating, stealing and saving. We need to ask: when has the thieving of books been acceptable?

For those of you who have not yet met Poggio

Following on from my last posting about William Shepherd’s Life of Poggio, I realise that I have been frightfully ill-mannered and have not introduced to you its ‘hero’, Poggio Bracciolini (1380 – 1457). I am sure many of you have already met him, but in case you are uncertain whether you would recognise him, I provide a portrait:

The image is, obviously, a nineteenth-century drawing. It is taken from the frontispiece of Tommaso Tonelli’s translation of Shepherd’s Lives, published in two volumes in 1825. It is a set of volumes which, through the miracle of e-Bay, I now own, sold to me by Gail Tothill of New York for a price which pleased my bank-balance but saddened my soul, to think in what low esteem such works must presently be held.

More of you will have met Poggio than think you have: as you walked through the Duomo in Florence, and turned to your left, averting your gaze from the English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, you would have seen a statue of one of the saints which is said to have been modelled on Poggio in cadaverous old age.

And, if you have not met Poggio there, you are well acquainted with his works. He is famous for his re-discoveries of ancient texts, ‘liberating’ Quintilian and others from monastic ‘dungeons’ (aka libraries), for reviving the art of the Ciceronian dialogue and, most enduringly, for inventing the script known as littera antiqua, the humanist bookhand which was supposedly a return to ancient elegance and which you will all recognise since, when manuscripts were joined in the world by printed books, it became the basis for Roman type — the ancestor of modern Times New Roman.

Poggio also had a lively sense of humour and an eye for the ladies. He knew how to live and when you next raise a glass of Chianti, think of him.

Liverpool, the Renaissance and a little-known manuscript of Poggio Bracciolini

This being conference season, when I flew away from Dublin, I had four days to prepare a paper for a second conference. This was a one-day event, organised in Liverpool by my friend, Stella Fletcher, and sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies, entitled ‘William Roscoe and Italy.’ Stella can be proud of herself for arranging what proved to be a highly successful occasion, held in the refined surroundings of The Athenaeum Club, and attracting both academics and a range of interested local people. It was also an an event from which I learnt greatly.

William Roscoe, Liverpudlian banker, political liberal, art collector and biographer of both Lorenzo de’ Medici, the so-called Magnifico (1796), and his corpulent son, Leo X (1805), is himself far beyond my usual intellectual stomping ground. The furthest my studies have previously reached in the history of scholarship has been the antiquaries of the early eighteenth century, in particular Thomas Hearne. But my task for the day was to discuss the work of Roscoe’s self-declared disciple, Rev. William Shepherd (1768 – 1847), who penned the first – and, so far, only – English Life of Poggio, first published in 1802, with a second revised edition in 1837. That second edition was informed by the Italian translation of Sheperd’s biography, which appeared in 1825, augmented with detailed footnotes – and undertaken by no less a person than Cavaliere Tommaso Tonelli who went on to produce the edition of Poggio Bracciolini’s letters which remained the standard work until the 1980s.

The role of Roscoe and his circle in developing British studies of the Renaissance has received some popular notice recently, including a name-check on Bettany Hughes’ BBC radio programme. It struck me from last week’s proceedings, however, that its significance may still be underestimated. In terms of the history of British scholarship, Roscoe and Shepherd – religious dissenters and political radicals wedded to their North-western identity – seem to me to mark out a particular approach to learning, quite distant from that of the antiquaries in either of the university towns or in London. In terms of the historiography of the Renaissance, these English authors, and their Italian enthusiasts, provide a perspective which has been too often overlooked because their approach was largely superseded by what could be called the Swiss school, comprising such divergent figures as Jean Charles Sismonde de Sismondi and Jacob Burckhardt. Burckhardt’s Civilisation of Italy in the Renaissance, like the works of Karl Marx in a different field, had an influence that was immense but is now increasingly incomprehensible. Burckhardt’s evocative image of the discovery of individualism, in which everything became a work of art created for one’s own use, has proven an engrossing mythology. Perhaps, though, if scholarship had not gone down that particularly beguiling path, and continued with the approach of Roscoe and Shepherd, which saw an association between mercantile cities and cultural achievement, but did not dress it up in tales of individualism, less ink may have been wasted. Roscoe was father of other myths, certainly, but perhaps they would have proven less corrosive.

My time in the Athenaeum – of which Roscoe was a founder member – was made all the more productive because I had chance to see a manuscript there. William Shepherd was given a manuscript of Poggio’s Epistolae which was sold at auction the year after his death. The manuscript survives, though it is not listed in Neil Ker’s Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, nor is it mentioned in Helene Harth’s 1980s edition of Poggio’s Lettere. The oversight might not be that surprising: when I visited the Athenaeum, they were not sure that they had any such thing but I was certain it was there as it had been seen by that exacting scholar, Martin Davies, who mentioned it in print in Italian Studies in 1993. And, sure enough, the helpful staff at the Athenaeum kindly hunted out the volume and I had a happy half-hour studying it. It had been bought by the Athenaeum at the auction of Shepherd’s library. It may not be of great textual value, but its interest lies not just in the fact that it owned by Poggio’s nineteenth-century biographer and annotated in pencil by him. The manuscript was produced in Italy in the third quarter of the century and may have spent its first years there, but what I discovered is that it has marginalia by an English hand, demonstrating it was in this country by the early sixteenth century at the latest. It is witness, then, to the English interest in that most human of humanists, Poggio Braccolini – an interest to which William Shepherd was a worthy heir.

De minimis curat eruditus

If bonæ litteræ seems a curious title for this blog, think how much more curious it would seem if it read bone littere.

Bonæ litteræ - literally, ‘good letters’ – is well-known in humanist circles as the term favoured by Erasmus to describe polished literature. It was one of a chain of fashionable slogans used by devotees of the humanist enterprise. The earliest, and most enduring, was studia humanitatis, a phrase signifying ‘the studies of what it is to be human’ or, perhaps better, ‘the understanding about how to become truly human.’ The exact meaning matters less than its resonance: this was a phrase in a re-found oration of Cicero’s which could succinctly signify the commitment of a coterie of early quattrocento Florentines to rediscover and revive classical learning. Later in the century – and this is what the textbooks emphasise – studia humanitatis became to signify a defined educational curriculum. At that point, the phrase lost its innovative glow, and other slogans took its place.

The early humanists – men like Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini – not only wanted to write afresh, they wanted their texts to look fresh. And so, there was a reform both of handwriting and of the presentation of the book, with a large display script of separated letters – the origin, when manuscripts turned into printed books, of Roman type – and an insistence that margins should not be stuffed with commentary in a tiny hand but should stand wide and white, so as not to detract from the classical or classicising text in front of the reader. As one small but significant part of this agenda, there was a reform of spelling. In Latin, there are several words which have two vowels together which make one sound, what is called a diphthong. If one of those vowels is missed out, it can transform the word into a completely different one: so, for example, aequus means ‘fair’ or ‘right’, but equus means ‘horse.’ In medieval script, the two words had become indistinguishable as marking the diphthong had fallen into disuse. So, ‘bone littere’ would be a thoroughly medieval name for this blog. The early humanists insisted on returning to the full spelling and writing both vowels, which would give us bonae litterae. But the humanist also tended to elide together the two vowels to signify they should be pronounced as one sound, and the most usual form became that which you see in this title.

In short, it may be that de minimis curat non lex: the law may not be concerned with the tiniest matters - but a scholar certainly should be.