When Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of China died in 210 BC, with him were buried princes and concubines, the royal zoo, several hundred horses with terracotta grooms, and a baked clay army of thousands.
If his death was impressive, in life this Chinese Napoleon unified the empire and built the Great Wall. Unfortunately, he also ordered all the ancient books in his empire to be burnt and the execution of 460 scholars guilty of hiding their libraries. Down the centuries, his action has become a symbol of the ultimate impotence of tyranny.
The written word survived; he didn’t.
Through the ages, writing things down has proved to be liberating, illuminating and downright dangerous, but with help coming at the oddest moments.
In the Soviet era, when the Russian State Library was unable to return a rare book to Aberdeen University because it couldn’t afford the postage, the British Council intervened. Inter-library loans have been a dodgy business ever since.
When Alexander the Great died in 232 BC, his ramshackle empire fell apart. Ptolemy was in charge of Egypt at the time, and decided to make his mark by establishing his new capital Alexandria as a centre of learning to rival Athens. He built a scientific and research centre and poured money into attracting the greatest scholars of the age. His most ambitious project was to establish for the first time secure, reliable editions of classical Greek literature. The Mediterranean was scoured for manuscripts from which scholars produced definitive text, and from which, all ours derive.
In the mid-third century BC, the bibliophile Ptolemy III contacted the library at Athens asking for their official copies of the manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes. The Athenians agreed to lend them, against a returnable deposit of 15 talents (the cost of building about 15 warships). Deciding this was an excellent Ptolemy forgot to return them - though he kindly sent copies.
Aberdeen University must be kicking itself. Think what a university could do with 15 warships these days.
The Dark Ages of libraries returned in 1987 when the British Council announced it was closing its lending libraries in more than 100 countries around the world. Out went those space hogging units known as books, such tiresome collections of feeling, attitude, experience, wisdom, humour, and curiosity, with their irritating diversities of height, colour, texture, weight and smell.
In came Information Centres: a gleaming homogeneity of terminals and keyboards; culture reduced to easy access data. It was a stupid and bizarre decision of global philistinism. As the most obsessively verbal culture on earth, whose literary traditions of artistic excellence have lasted 1,100 years, English as the handmaiden of creativity, scholarship and inquiry was replaced by an Intel Pentium.
The closure of these libraries was calculated ‘to make way for something better’. Oh really? They should have kept the books and junked the Council.
Does it matter that books are replaced with computers? Well, it is a truism never to be forgotten that however much we love something we never know the depth of that love until we have lost it.
To be honest, civic centres of learning used to intimidate me. As a child, my father refused to take me to the British Museum in London on the grounds that I was bound to break something priceless, and my mum refused to take me to the Natural History Museum because she didn’t like stuffed birds. When I finally did visit the Natural History Museum as an adult, I liked it for all the wrong reasons: the mahogany cabinets full of fish, the slightly dotty experts, and the faint smell of formaldehyde.
Libraries used to intimidate me until I started my own. And when I did, I was amazed and delighted to discover how many people from totally different backgrounds also had libraries. Since then, I have visited a few private libraries I would pay good money to be locked inside for a couple of years.
Years ago, over dinner with a Russian woman, I was asked to guess her father’s profession in Moscow. She told me he had a library in excess of 8,000 books, 5,000 of which were in languages other than Russian: French, German, English, Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew, all of which he was fully fluent in and used almost every day at work.
Not surprisingly, I assumed he was an academic. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was a taxi driver, an occupation his proud daughter claimed was perfect for the bibliophile he was.
It takes a long time to build a good library, but once you get going it’s difficult to stop. My room is book lined and I may well leave this world when one of the heavy cases topples over one night on to my bed and all they find will be one shoe poking out between The Two Towers and The Punch Book of Humour. Can’t imagine a nicer way to go.
These days, the fact that book publishers pay big money to have their books displayed in the most prominent places in a bookshop should come as no surprise. But then, it should not surprise the publishers that quite often their hard sell, controversial “prize winner” along with the media tie-in, free burger and poster, with some profits going to the Kandahar Lesbian Outreach Centre, don’t necessarily make for better books.
What is worrying is that the publishers don’t appear to care about the quality of writing as books become just another product on the shelves, shuffled around at the occasional whim of the publishing conglomerate. Sigh.
To end on a defiantly optimistic note, there are authors who continue to provide both insight and discovery, delivered in literary art. Look beyond the the hyped nonsense and you may come across a title by Simon Schama, a historian and Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. If you do, don’t hesitate to pick it up; because if you like history that is provocative, exhilarating, beautifully written in visual prose, none of his books will let you down.
As a writer, he is excellent company, and whatever period he covers becomes an irresistble journey for the reader.
His books include:
“Landscape & Memory” - which examines our relationship with the landscape around us and the impact it has had on culture and imagination.
“The Embarrasment of Riches” - an interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age.
“Citizens” - a Chronicle of the French Revolution.
“Dead Certainties” - a quirky and fascinating collection of “unwarranted speculations”
By Roger Beaumont
  Available at Bookazine

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