I read an enchanting book over the holidays: Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (New York, 2022), translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle. The book weaves together reflections on the ancient and the modern world and celebrates libraries, books, and the power of words.

Vallejo begins with the Great Library of Alexandria and moves easily backward and forward in time, telling stories of books, libraries, authors, ordinary people, rulers, and her own life. She wants us to see why the past matters, writing with passion and erudition – a heady mixture!

The short length and easy focus of several of the chapters in the book reminded me of blog posts, and so I’m reposting some extended excerpts from the book, on libraries and librarians, which are particularly fitting for my own world.

Early in the book, Vallejo writes about precursors to the Library of Alexandria:

“The Library of Alexandria also had Egyptian ancestors, but these are the most blurred in the family photograph. During the pharaonic period, there were private libraries and libraries in temples, but our knowledge of them is vague. Sources mention Houses of Books, archives where administrative documents were kept, and Houses of Life, storehouses sheltering thousand-year traditions, where sacred texts were copied, interpreted, and protected. The most specific details we have of an Egyptian library come from the Greek traveler Hecataeus of Abdera, who managed to get a guided tour of the Temple of Amon at Thebes. He describes his walk through the labyrinth of halls, courtyards, alleys, and rooms of the enclosure as an exotic experience. He claims to have seen the sacred library in a covered gallery, and on it the words ‘The Place of the Cure of the Soul.’ Beyond the beauty of this idea—the library as a clinic for the soul—we know hardly anything about Egyptian book collections” (p. 51).

Vallejo returns to libraries later, reflecting on the proliferation of libraries in the modern world. She writes:

“Each library is unique, and as someone once told me, it always resembles its librarian. I have immense admiration for those hundreds of thousands of people who still believe in the future of books, or rather, in their ability to dissolve time. Who advise, encourage, plot activities, and devise pretexts for the reader’s gaze to awaken the words that slumber, sometimes for years, in a book lying on a shelf. Who know that this act, though commonplace, fundamentally implies the resurrection—rise up, Lazarus!—of a whole world” (p. 135).

Later, after a harrowing description of the destruction of the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo in 1992, Vallejo reflects on the destruction of books and libraries throughout history, and yet their miraculous persistence:

“Though the Library of Alexandria was repeatedly burned and destroyed, not all was lost. Centuries of effort to save its imaginative legacy weren’t in vain. Many books that survive to this day still bear the textual hallmarks and symbols used by the Alexandrian philologists in their editions. And this means that to reach our hands, copies have traveled along a treacherous route, from copy to copy to copy, whose first link in the train of transmission dates to the lost library. For hundreds and hundreds of years, the books available at Alexandria were carefully copied and distributed through a network of humbler libraries and private collections, nurturing a burgeoning landscape of readers. Multiplying the number of copies represented the only remote possibility of safeguarding these works. If anything survived the devastation it was thanks to that slow, gentle, fertile irrigation of handwritten texts that were disseminated with great effort, reaching far-flung places that were hidden and safe, lowly places that would never be turned into battlefields. The works we still read endured in these corners—insignificant, marginal refuges—holding out against devastation through dangerous centuries, while great numbers of books, usually concentrated in centers of power, were ruined by waves of destruction, looting, and fires” (p. 220).

Papyrus is a wonderful read – highly recommended!

 

All of the images in this post were created by Natasha D’Schommer for the book Tulips, Chocolate & Silk. Celebrating 65 Years of the James Ford Bell Library, by Marguerite Ragnow & Natasha D’Schommer. It was a Minnesota Book Awards Finalist in 2020. Please contact us if you would like to purchase a copy.