A famous librarian? Well, yes, insofar as there can be such a thing. According to the magazine American Libraries, Mr. Richardson was one of the 100 most important librarians of the twentieth century. How many of the other 99 can you name? That would be an amusing party game. Specifically, it would be the kind of game you reserve for the end of the party, when there are still too many guests hanging around far too late into the evening, and it is necessary to clear out the room in a hurry.
Since Wikipedia exists, we shall not attempt a summary of Richardson’s life here. For our purpose the most significant thing about him was his interest in very old books. People may mean different things by “very old” when they speak of books. Dr. Boli has a copy of the first folio of Spenser’s works, printed in 1611–1612 (apparently it took a while), and visitors often think that is a very old book when they see it in the library. But Mr. Richardson would have regarded that as quite modern.
There are several classes of alleged libraries, which if they have real existence must necessarily precede all others. These include the libraries of the gods, animal or plant libraries, Preadamite and Coadamite libraries and the alleged libraries of the antediluvian patriarchs. All of these may be included under the term antediluvian and the period subdivided chronologically into Adamite or Patriarchal, Preadamite, Prehuman (plant and animal libraries) and Precosmic (libraries of the gods)!
We can see, then, that the era of James I is, comparatively speaking, so close to ours as to be virtually indistinguishable. It is possible, at least in mythology, to trace libraries back before the beginning of time, and if there is anything earlier than before the beginning of time we do not want to hear about it.
The oldest of all alleged libraries are the libraries of the gods.
Almost all the great god families, Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Scandinavian, had their own book-collections, so it is said. According to several religions there were book-collections before the creation of man; the Talmud has it that there was one before the creation of the world, the Vedas say that collections existed before even the Creator created himself, and the Koran maintains that such a collection co-existed from eternity with the uncreated God. It is obviously idle to try to trace libraries back farther than this. —The Beginnings of Libraries, by Ernest Cushing Richardson, Librarian of Princeton University (Princeton, 1914).
The Beginnings of Libraries traces the idea of the library back as far as it can go; according to Mr. Richardson himself, it ends at about 3400
In Biblical Libraries, he traces the libraries related to events and characters in the Bible from the Babylonian period to the time of the Apostles. “The period of Biblical history may be counted as extending from the beginning of written human history, about the first dynasty of Egypt or say 3400 B.C. (or 4200) more or less, until the death of the last of those who figure in the books of the New Testament or say the middle of the second century A.D.”
But this is of course oversimplifying the matter, because the Bible itself is a library, and therefore an enormous subject.
The Biblical story of course, and the Biblical story of libraries in a way, extends from the creation, which is by the “Word,” to the last Judgment, which, according to the account, is based on a collection of books. Not all of the events told in the Biblical writings have however yet happened, others, being parables, may never have happened and others, while they may be true, are not yet quite history and never will be if the critics can help it. It is one thing to be true, another thing to be believed to be true and yet another to be history.
To complete a trilogy on ancient libraries, we bring forward a book that was actually published three years before the other two: Some Old Egyptian Librarians.
The very title of this paper has amused some, quite as if they thought the subject would be exhausted by the sentence “there were none”, but nevertheless the paper is in sober historical earnest. It, in fact, proposes, among other things, to introduce to you by name and date and with some details of their lives, not always wholly without piquancy, twenty-one librarians who lived long before Assurbanipal, and by the same token, much longer before the Alexandrian library was founded. Moreover this paper makes no pretence of exhaustiveness—it is only a desultory beginning in a rich field. It is a mere sample so to speak of the wealth of material which has not yet gotten much into the encyclopaedias—or the universities.
Though The Beginnings of Libraries would dwell much on mythology, Mr. Richardson is at pains to point out that his Egyptian librarians are real historical figures. However, that does not mean we should dismiss the mythology.
If this account of Egyptian librarians begins with the librarians of the gods Thoth and Seshait please do not think that the paper is to be legendary or mythological in character; on the contrary, it will deal with real human librarians and the genuine historical monuments of these librarians in papyri or inscriptions. The mythological librarians, however, have two great virtues: first they embody the philosophy of books and libraries current among the Egyptians and second these gods were in fact the gods of the librarians themselves, seriously worshipped by them. The significance of this latter fact for the biographical interpretation of historical human librarians is very great, for as a man’s god is, so is he. Tell me a man’s god and I will tell you the character of the man. There is a sound psychological reason for this, since a man’s god is that on which his thoughts most dwell (or conversely that on which one’s thoughts most dwell is one’s god) and what our thoughts dwell upon as ideal that we become. And if, farther, a man’s ideal of his profession is made personal, whether that person be human or divine, this hero worship, or god worship, works all the more powerfully. Not to know Thoth is thus to miss the key to the Egyptian librarian, for Thoth was the ideal of the Egyptian librarian, constantly in his mind for imitation.
So here is the foundation for your own little library of books on libraries: three short but very entertaining books by Ernest Cushing Richardson, one of the hundred most famous American librarians of the twentieth century.
The Beginnings of Libraries. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. Princeton, 1914.
Biblical Libraries. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. A sketch of literary history from 3400 b.c. to a.d. 150. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. Princeton, 1914.
Some Old Egyptian Librarians. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911.