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Writings Engraved in Wood, The Book of the Stations of the Sun and the Moon, The Book of Places and
What Is in Them and so on.
An imaginary portrait of Callimachus from the sixteenth century. (photo credit 13.1)
The system Callimachus chose for Alexandria seems to have been based less on an orderly listing of the
library’s possessions than on a preconceived formulation of the world itself. All classifications are
ultimately arbitrary. That proposed by Callimachus seems a little less so because it follows the system of
thought accepted by the intellectuals and scholars of his time, inheritors of the Greek view of the world.
Callimachus divided the library into shelves or tables (pinakoi) arranged in eight classes or subjects:
drama, oratory, lyric poetry, legislation, medicine, history, philosophy and miscellany. He separated the
longer works by having them copied into several shorter sections called “books”, so as to have smaller
rolls that would be more practical to handle.
Callimachus was not to finish his gigantic enterprise, which was completed by succeeding librarians. The
full pinakoi — whose official title was Tables of Those Who Were Outstanding in Every Phase of Culture,
andTheir Writings — apparently extended to 120 rolls. To Callimachus we also owe a cataloguing device
that was to become commonplace: the custom of arranging volumes in alphabetical order. Before that
time, only a few Greek inscriptions listing series of names (some dating from the second century BC)
make use of alphabetical order. According to the French critic Christian Jacob, Callimachus’s library was
the first example of “a utopian place of criticism, in which the texts can be compared, opened side by
side”. With Callimachus, the library became an organized reading-space.
All the libraries I’ve known reflect that ancient library. The dark Biblioteca del Maestro (Teacher’s
Library) in Buenos Aires, where I could look out the windows to see jacaranda trees covering the street in
blue blossoms; the exquisite Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, surrounded like an Italian villa
by orderly gardens; the venerable British Library, where I sat (so I was told) in the chair Karl Marx had
chosen when he wrote Das Kapital; the three-shelf library in the town of Djanet, in the Algerian Sahara,
where among the Arabic books I saw one mysterious copy of Voltaire’s Candide in French; the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where the section reserved for erotic literature is called Hell; the
beautiful Metro Toronto Reference Library, where one can watch the snow fall on the slanted glass panes
as one reads — all these copy, with variations, Callimachus’s systematic vision.
The Library of Alexandria and its catalogues became the models first for the libraries of imperial Rome,
then for those of the Byzantine East and later for those of Christian Europe. In De doctrina christiana,
written shortly after his conversion in 387, Saint Augustine, still under the influence of Neoplatonic
thought, argued that a number of works from the Greek and Roman classics were compatible with
Christian teaching, since authors such as Aristotle and Virgil had “unjustly possessed the truth” (what
Plotinus called the “spirit” and Christ the “Word” or logos). In that same eclectic spirit, the earliest known
library of the Roman Church, founded in the 380s by Pope Damasus I in the Church of St. Lorenzo,
contained not only the Christian books of the Bible, works of commentary and a selection of the Greek
apologists, but also several Greek and Roman classics. (However, the acceptance of the ancients was still
discriminatory; commenting on a friend’s library in the mid-fifth century, Apollinaris Sidonius complained
that pagan authors were being separated from Christian ones — the pagans near the gentlemen’s seats,
the Christians near the ladies’.)
How then should such diverse writings be catalogued? The keepers of the first Christian libraries made
shelf-lists to record their books. Bibles were listed first, then glosses, the works of the Church Fathers
(Saint Augustine at the top), philosophy, law and grammar. Medical books were sometimes listed at the
end. Since most books were not formally titled, a descriptive title was applied or the first words of the
text were used to designate the book. The alphabet sometimes served as a key for retrieving volumes. In
the tenth century, for instance, the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with
his collection of 117,000 volumes when travelling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels
trained to walk in alphabetical order.
A rare depiction of Richard de Fournival conversing with his mistress, from a thirteenth-century
illuminated manuscript. (photo credit 13.2)
Perhaps the earliest example of subject cataloguing in medieval Europe is that of the library of Le Puy
Cathedral in the eleventh century, but for a long time this type of cataloguing was not the norm. In many
cases, divisions of books were established simply for practical reasons. At Canterbury in the 1200s, the
books in the Archbishop’s library were listed according to the faculties that had the most use for them. In
1120, Hugh of Saint Victor proposed a cataloguing system in which the contents of each book were briefly
summarized (as in a modern abstract) and placed in one of three categories corresponding to the
tripartite division of the liberal arts: theoretical, practical or mechanical.
In the year 1250, Richard de Fournival, whose theories on reading and memory I described earlier,
imagined a cataloguing system based on a horticultural model. Comparing his library to a garden “where-
in his fellow-citizens might gather the fruits of knowledge”, he divided this garden into three flowerbeds
— corresponding to philosophy, the “lucrative sciences” and theology — and each flowerbed into a
number of smaller plots or areolae, each containing a table of contents or tabula (like the pinakoi of
Callimachus) of the plot’s subject-matter. The flowerbed of philosophy, for instance, was divided into three
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