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Libraries Without Walls ROGER CHARTIER Libraries WithoutWalls These examples made it possible fora librarianof genius to discoverthe fundamentallaw of the Library.This thinkerobserved thatall the books, no matterhow diversethey might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-twoletters of the alphabet. He also alleged a factwhich travelers have confirmed:In thevast Library there are no twoidentical books. From these two incontrovertiblepremises he deduced that the Libraryis totaland thatits shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-oddorthographical symbols (a numberwhich, although vast,is not infinite):in other words,all thatit is given to express,in all languages. Everything:the minutelydetailed historyof the future,the archangels' autobiographies,the faithfulcatalogue of the Library,thousands and thousands of false catalogues,the demonstrationof the fallacyof those catalogues,the demonstrationof the fallacyof the true catalogue, the Gnosticgospel of Basilides, the commentaryon thatgospel, the commentary on the commentaryon thatgospel, the true storyof your death, the translationof all books in all languages, the interpolationsof everybook in all books. When it was proclaimedthat the Librarycontained all books, the firstimpression was one of extravaganthappiness. Jorge Luis Borges' W H E N I T WA S P RO C L AI ME D that the Library contained all books, the firstimpression was extravagant happiness." The dream of a library (in a variety of configurations) that would bring together all accumulated knowledge and all the books ever written can be found throughout the history of Western civiliza- tion. It underlay the constitution of great princely, ecclesiastical, and private "libraries"; it justified a tenacious search for rare books, lost editions, and texts that had disappeared; it commanded architectural projects to construct edifices capable of welcoming the world's memory. Bringing together the entire written patrimony of humanity in one place proves an impossible task, though. When print produced a proliferation of titles and editions, it ruined all hope for an exhaustive collection. Even for those who hold that a library must be encyclopedic, selection is an absolute necessity. This was true for Gabriel Naude in his Advispour dresserune bibliotheque,written in 1627 and addressed to Henri de Mesmes, presidentat the Parlement de Paris and a great book collector.2 Against the model of the cabinet curieux or the cabinet choisi reserved for the delectation of their proprietor and gathering together a small number of books distinguished for their rarityor their luxury, Naude pleads for a well-furnished library: "It is much more useful and necessary to have, for 38 REPRESENTATIONS 42 - Spring1993 C PolityPress This content downloaded from 128.192.114.19 on Sat, 30 May 2015 13:37:09 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions example, a greatquantity of books well bound in the ordinaryfashion than to fill only some small, pale, gilded, and decorous room or cabinet enriched with all manner of littleoddities [mignardise],luxuries, and superfluities."3A libraryis not built to satisfyegotistical enjoyments but because there is "no more honest and assured means for acquiring a great renown among the peoples than to erect handsome and magnificentLibraries in order then to dedicate and consecrate them to the use of the public."4 Ideally made up of an "infinityof good, singular,and remarkable"works, the librarymust nonetheless limit its ambitionsand make choices: Still,in ordernot to leavethis quantity infinite by not defining it, and also in ordernot to throwthe curious out of all hope of beingable to accomplishand cometo theend of this handsomeenterprise, it seemsto me thatit is appropriateto do as thePhysicians do, who orderthe quantityof drugsaccording to theirquality, and to saythat one cannotlack gatheringall those[books] that have the qualities and conditionsrequired for being put in a Library.5 Naude's Advisthus functionsto guide the collectoras he makes necessaryselec- tionsand takes the appropriate "precautions,"since Naude indicatesthe authors and the worksabsolutely indispensable for his library. The divisionbetween the books that one absolutelymust possess and those thatmight (or must) be leftaside is onlyone of the waysto mitigatethe problem of the impossibilityof a universallibrary. There were other ways,which the lan- guage of the seventeenthand eighteenthcenturies indicated withthe veryterm definingthe place in whichthe books were kept: bibliotheque.In the entryfor that word in Furetiere'sDictionnaire (1690) the firstdefinition is the most traditional meaning: "Bibliotheque:Apartment or place destined for puttingbooks; gallery, building full of books. Also said in general of the books that are placed in this vessel." Next comes a second meaning designatinga book rather than a place: "Bibliothequeis also a Collection,a Compilationof severalworks of the same nature or of Authorswho have compiled all thatcan be [compiled] on the same subject." The Latin termsfor a collectionvary considerably in these titles:thesaurus, corpus,catalogus, fiores, and so forth.In Frenchthe genre was usuallyqualified as a bibliotheque.Four years afterthe publicationof Furetiere'sDictionnaire, the Dic- tionnaireof the Academie Francaise bore witnessto this preference: "One also calls BibliothequesCollections and Compilationsof works of like nature." Three examples followthe definition:"La Bibliothequedes Peres, La NouvelleBibliotheque desPeres, La Bibliothequedu DroitFranqois." Eighteenth-centurybookseller-publishers published great numbers of these multiple-volumecollections gathering together published worksin a given genre such as novels, tales, or travelaccounts. Many collections,however, made use of boththe formulaand the terminaugurated by the Amsterdamperiodicals ofJean Le Clerc, the Bibliothequeuniverselle et historique (1686-93), the Bibliothequechoisie LibrariesWithout Walls 39 This content downloaded from 128.192.114.19 on Sat, 30 May 2015 13:37:09 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions (1703-13), and the Bibliothequeancienne et moderne:Pour servir de suiteaux Biblio- thequesuniverselle et choisie ( 1714-27). In all, therewere thirty-oneperiodical pub- licationsin the French language, some of which lasted longer than others,that were offeredunder the titleof bibliothequebetween 1686 and 1789.6The termwas used throughoutthe century,with seventeen titlespublished before 1750 and fourteen after. Several of these publications were not periodicals, properly speaking,but imposingcollections of textsrelated by their genre or theirtargeted audience. One such was the Bibliothequeuniverselle des romans(1775-89, com- prising224 volumes in duodecimo format),which was presentedas a "periodical work in which is given the reasoned analysis of Novels-ancient and modern, French or translatedinto our language," which published extractsand summa- ries, historicaland criticalnotes, unabridged textsof novels, and tales both tra- ditionaland original.7Another was theBibliotheque universelle des dames (1785-97, comprising 156 octodecimo-sizedvolumes), which had encyclopedicambitions, given thatit contained travelnarratives, novels, works of history,morality, math- ematicsand astronomy,physics and naturalhistory, and all the liberal arts. These imposing"libraries," along withthe encyclopediasand the dictionaries, constituteda major part of the great publishingventures of the eighteenthcen- tury.As Louis-SebastienMercier noted, theyguaranteed the diffusionof knowl- edge-or at least of literarypleasure-and theyprovided a livingfor a multitude of the people who were scornfullycalled demi-litterateursor ecrivailleurs.8 The "libraries,"which aimed at being exhaustiveand universalin any given genre or domain, had a counterpointin the eighteenthcentury in a vastnumber of equally popular small,concise, and easilyhandled volumes named extraits,esprits, abreges, analyses,and so forth.9 The smaller,portable anthologieswere another formof "library"produced by the book trade. Even if both genres offeredextracts, their intention was not the same. The smallerworks aimed at eliminating,selecting, and reducing rather than accumulatinga multitudeof separate and dispersed worksin one collection, periodical or not. If the collectionsin a bibliothequewere constructedwith the aim of accomplishingthe impossibletask of assemblingfor every reader all the books concerninga particularsubject, an appeal to analyseand espritimplied that such a task was useless or harmful,and that the necessaryknowledge-available in a small number of works-needed to be concentratedor distilledlike a chemical substance. In that belief the compilers of portable anthologies agreed with the utopian writersof the century who rejected encyclopedic libraries as over- encumbered and superfluousand permittedonly a veryfew books in theirideal library. In his utopia (more accurately,his "uchronia") of 1771, L'An 2440, Louis- Sebastien Mercierpays a visitto the libraryof the kingand findsit to be somewhat singular: "In place of those four galleries of immense length,which contained many thousands of volumes, I could only findone small cabinet,in which were 40 REPRESENTATIONS This content downloaded from 128.192.114.19 on Sat, 30 May 2015 13:37:09 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions several books that seemed to me far fromvoluminous." Intrigued, Mercier asks the librarianwhat has happened, and the librariananswers thatbefore burning all the
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