2021-12-08 LIVE from NYPL The Library: A Fragile History Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen with JaneKamensky >> Aidan Flax-Clark: Hello out there, whenever and wherever you may be watching this. My name is Aidan Flax-Clark, and I work at the New York Public Library. And I am here to welcome you into today's conversation, which is with authors Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen. They are the authors of a new book called Library, A Fragile History. And they'll be speaking with historian Jane Kamensky about it. Andrew Pettegree is a Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. And Arthur der Weduwen is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. And Jane Kamensky is Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and the Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. You can read their full bios on our event listing on our website. Across time in the world from the library at Alexandria to the one in Erasmus' [inaudible] to even our own beloved NYPL, Andrew and Arthur chart in their words, "Personal work-a-day collections reflecting the personal taste of an individual, while others are vast endeavors established as monuments to national civic pride." And as they also write, "In the endless cycle from destruction to greatness, libraries have always recovered." That sentiment in this particular moment in history really resonates I suspect with not only all the public libraries in this city, but all of them around the country. It's something we've been proud to demonstrate over these past two years. Andrew and Arthur's book also makes it clear that the story of a library is as much a story of the place itself as it is the story of its collections, who acquires what, what gets preserved, what gets destroyed, and what fades or flourishes in importance from decade to decade. That story is very much at the heart of our most recent exhibition treasures. The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library's Treasurers showcases some of the most extraordinary items from the 56 million in our collections. They tell the story of people, places, and moments spanning 4,000 years. And I'm sitting in front of a few of those right now. There's a Shakespeare First Folio, first editions by Phillis Wheatley and Thomas Moore, and Sor Juana de la Cruz. There's a 14th century Quran and, you know, for good measure, a Gutenberg Bible. I picked them, you know, because we're having a bookish kind of event tonight. You can visit these items and many, many more by going to the exhibit in-person, you go to nypl.org/treasures to register for your free timed ticket. Although if you can't make it in-person for whatever reason, you can go to that same website, nypl.org/treasures to check out the entire exhibition online plus audio guides and much, much more. Anyway, back to the book again, which is Library, A Fragile History. If you have an NYPL library card, or you live in New York State and you want to apply for one now, you can borrow Library, A Fragile History from us. And of course, you can also if you're able, buy it from us in the library shop. Proceeds from your purchase go to benefit the library, and links to borrow or purchase the book you can find on the event listing, in the chat, and we'll make sure to share them a couple times. Please get your copy of the book. It's really quite a fantastic read. And Andrew also assembled a list of reading recommendations for the reading about the histories of books and libraries along with some short explanations about why he picked each one. That's a really fantastic list that is also on the event page as our links, about how to borrow them from us. Okay. So we're going to get to the conversation in a second. If you have any questions for today's speakers, send them whenever you're able and they'll get to as many as they can at the end. You can send them at any time using the chat, the Google Form, or by emailing publicprograms@nypl.org. Lastly, real-time captions are available for today's program. You can click on the closed caption button or you can use the stream text link that we shared in the reminder email and the chat just now for live transcript. Okay. Let's turn things over to Jane Kamensky, and Andrew Pettegree, and Arthur der Weduwen. >> Jane Kamensky: Hi, everybody. And thanks for that, Aidan. It's a real pleasure to be here with Andrew and Arthur today. Let me echo Aidan's praise for the amazing book that you see beside me, Library, A Fragile History, which has an amazing range of evidence from paintings, and inventories, legal documents, auction records, marginalia, a vast sweep and a rendition going from cuneiform to the Google Books settlement and beyond, and that also wears its learning lightly. It's playful, it's full of rich anecdote and incisive analysis, as you would expect from these two towering historians of the book, in the Renaissance and Reformation. And I guess my first question to this author pair is, what made you want to turn from the kind of work that you've done as scholars of the sort of short, deep furrow of the Dutch Golden Age or the book in the Reformation to something that takes on this kind of time and space? Tell us a little bit about the impulse for doing this work. And then I have some more questions about the actual doing of it. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Well, I think I'll kick off there. Thanks a lot for that Jane, and thank you all for coming in and being here today, everyone. I mean, this was a -- it was an immense pleasure to write this book. And first of all -- first thing I should say is that, you know, writing about things you're not necessarily a true expert on is a lot of fun and you learn a lot in the process. And I think that is the reason we enjoyed doing this book so much. But secondly, I mean, yes, we've done a lot of work on the history of the book in the Reformation, in the Renaissance, and, you know, we were constantly coming up against libraries then, especially when we started to delve into the history of the 17th century Dutch Republic. And we came across this wonderful collection of auction catalogs. And these auction catalogs would display thousands of books that used to grace the bookshelves of the Dutch men and women in the 17th century. And there's no trace otherwise beyond these catalogs that these libraries ever existed. And this, you know, was a first sort of window into a part of library history that's not often discussed in a literature that's out there, because when people tend to write about libraries it tends to be either stories of great buildings, or of great architecture, the most beautiful libraries in the world, and there's some wonderful books out there you can get that will lead you on a sort of global tour of magnificent buildings. And yes, they're a pleasure to look at and learn about, but the library story that we gradually uncovered here was much more diverse and much richer. And really it was -- We found that the personal collecting, the private collections played a really essential part in the library story, often from rescuing the library at times when institutional libraries came on the great threat, as in for example, the Reformation. So it was that diversity that set us on this path of moving beyond simply the early modern period, and really trying to stretch this as far as possible. And the more we did this, the more we found themes that echoed throughout human history and that weren't just applicable to specific periods. And that again just made this such an enjoyable book to work on. >> Andrew Pettegree: Yes. I would say that yes, we've done some serious and prolonged work on the libraries of the Reformation, the Dutch Golden Age, the Renaissance, but they were always on a continuum. You know, the story of the library in the Renaissance is also about the Great Library of Alexandria. It's also about the Romans. It's also about the medieval preservation of the written remains of the Roman Empire. And then of course the story of the Renaissance book doesn't end with the early modern period, because it continues through the collecting practice of the 18th century, the breaking up of great collections and their reconstitution in the United States in the 19th century, and then of course to the tragedies of the 20th century, which threatened so much of this heritage. So, in a way, the Renaissance book spreads in both directions. So it seemed in a way a very natural thing to take on the entire history not least because -- as I'm sure you're might want to talk about at some point, the current situation of the library is a matter of great topicality and a significant political and cultural question, and one we didn't want to leave out, one we wanted to contribute to. >> Jane Kamensky: Tell us a bit about how you shared the work, right. A jointly authored work of book length nonfiction is anomalous, especially in the humanities, so I'm interested in how you divided up the work and wound up with something with such a sort of seamless and seemingly individual voice. And I'm especially interested in how you did a work of this kind of sweep that had to be completed when libraries all over the world were closed. >> Andrew Pettegree: Yeah. Well, that's a very good question. I mean, it does -- it helped that we'd done a great deal of work together and separately before the gates clenched shut in 2020. And in fact, the book was in an advanced stage of being written. Yes, it always astonishes me that more people in the humanities don't do work jointly because of course in the sciences, it's the normal order of things, collective work. But we have a group in St Andrews, which is in some respects much more like a lab bench than it is like a common humanities project. We have offices in proximity. And Arthur came to St Andrews initially to work with me. And I would say that if you have a talent like that cross your path, you want to play onto them because he is an extraordinarily gifted individual. This isn't the first book we've written together. In fact, we've written three other books together, and it was the first one which really taught us the working method, which was well groomed by the time we did this. And it starts with a drink in a particular and slightly sorted, to be honest, St Andrew's pub, where we take an envelope and we made the chapter headings and then divide the spoils between us rather like Napoleon and bit younger with the 19th century world. And so, I know what chapters I'm going to write, he knows what chapters he's going to write. And then we each do a draft of a chapter. It goes to the co-author, it comes back with track changes. And the only rule, which is a rule that emerged naturally is that you just accept the other guys' track changes without argument, and then that's the end of it. So we've never had a row about this. In the previous book on the Dutch Republic, some of my wild fantasies were eliminated by Arthur on patriotic Dutch grounds, but with this book, it's just a pretty, pretty simple process. And I'd found actually visiting one of the libraries that we were visiting at beginning of this process which was threatened with closure, I found old autobiography by Hugh Laurie talking about the way Blackadder was written. And it turns out that Ben Elton and Richard Curtis used exactly the same protocol that you just accept what your writing partner says about your work and don't sulk. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Yeah. And I think it helps too that, you know, we do a lot of the general research for the book together and for each of the chapters, even though like Andrew says, one of us will have the first responsibility for a draft. We do think jointly about what are the main points we want to make. You know, where is the chapter heading? And that helps, of course, when it then comes to accepting and working through a full version. And I should say, it's been -- yeah, it's been successful so far. One of the things we like to do with our students is to see if they can figure out who wrote what chapter, and so far, we've never had anyone get 100% correct. So perhaps we'll talk to publishers, see if we can get some sort of public competition going -- >> Jane Kamensky: The -- I mean, the merging of voices as well as, you know, sort of research expertise is really quite remarkable. So it sounds like a marvelous process. And finishing the book in the pandemic closure, were there ways that you -- I guess, were there ways that you encountered digitized collections that were different that have opened doors as well as doors clanking shut, you know, because of our current emergency? >> Andrew Pettegree: Well, we have also a big project which we do collectively, the Universal Short Title Catalogue, which is a survey of books in the first stage of print throughout the world. And when the first lockdown came very suddenly -- and I'm now in my office where I have several thousand books, and the offices were closed off, so, you know, for four months I was an academic without access to their own books. And so we just did data work. And one of the things we're doing is we're extending the scope of the Universal Short Title Catalogue to the end of the 17th century. So it was a good chance to get some of that data done. And of course, you find all sorts of things online which you did not know existed, including quite large collections of monographs, which either publishers had made open access for the Corona -- for the COVID crisis, which was extraordinarily generous, or the university had purchased. So yes, it's a form of work I don't like particularly, I don't like reading the screen, I think it's of unproven worth in terms of memory retention and things like that. So I would -- I miss my books, but nevertheless, we weren't prevented from working. And I should say one other absolutely critical factor is that we both worked in the same university, and so even during the lockdown, we probably spoke, you know, at least once during each day. So that kept the book running along very nicely. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Yeah. And I may add one more thing and that's we did to a large extent rely on secondhand bookshops as well, because even though, you know, so many places were closed physically, many bookshops were still just doing business online. So, you know, scouring the internet for titles you never knew existed was a lot of fun of this process. And it also brought home to us one of the things we talk about in the book is the importance of bookshops to general library culture. Also, of course, bookshops as spaces where you can in more normal times browse, which, you know, is something that isn't to be taken for granted with so many different forms of libraries. And indeed, so many of the very successful libraries of the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was circulating libraries run by book sellers. But it was a very nice sort of way to come full circle in that sense that we were relying to a large extent for our own books, but libraries on booksellers. >> Jane Kamensky: And thereby -- and I hadn't thought of this until you said it Arthur, thereby following in the footsteps of some of the collectors who you write about in such vivid and enlightening detail. So, here we are still in a virtual space, right, and I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing that we were in the lobby of the glorious Schwartzman Building of the NYPL on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. So, I wondered if we could pretend for a moment there that we were sharing that space and listen to you tracing a bit of the sort family tree, the genealogy of a grand civic library space like that, the family tree of libraries for a civic public, and including the reason that building looks the way it does. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, it's got a long history, and it's one of the things worth keeping mind is just how long it took for that building to get there. And just like so many other grand libraries we admire today, you know, we like to think that they are parts and parcel of our library world, so they must have been around forever, but in fact, they haven't. And, you know, one of the ironies of our -- of the research we did and of our book is that it's often in societies which have an abundance of books, what it's lots of books about great institutional libraries tend to have an actually quite a rough time with it because there are so many other means for people to access books. And that's one of the big themes in our book is that actually it's been tortuously difficult in human societies to come to a mutual understanding of how to organize a communal, open public collection of books, how to curate that, who is going to pay for it, who will allowed into it, what sort of books are you going to be keeping there? You know, all those questions we like to think we have now reached a model that is -- that will last forever. But libraries have gone through so many different types of iterations. And really the first sort of, I guess, if you think about the grandness of so many great public libraries, indeed of course, the New York Public Library too, in some ways that harkens back to a renaissance model of great elite courtly libraries where the library of course too is a social space. It's a space where people are to meet and go, but also just be impressed by the fact of what has been brought together and how that's being presented. So the grandeur of these buildings is extremely important. And so, although we do talk a lot about architecture in our book, I think it's important not to be beguiled by it because often the architecture may have very little to do with the content of the books in particular buildings. So that's one particular model. Great courtly libraries where visitors will be invited to share in the delights that a prince or a duke has acquired. Then you've got another older tradition, and that is of the sort of early parish or town libraries. Now, these really -- I mean, they already date back to the days of Emperor Charlemagne in the medieval era with instructions to make available open collections in parish libraries so all learned people can enjoy these. And you find this all throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods throughout Europe. Attempts for people to say, we are proud of our community, we want to share knowledge and make books available. But how this happened -- I mean, there are lots of different varieties. Often books were not kept in a purpose-built building, but in an attic, in a church, in a town hall. And the various ways in which these books were gathered were also extremely diverse. Sometimes they would be paid for by funds of say the town council, but more often than that, it would be a personal collection by someone who had said, you know, I've collected my books at great expense during my lifetime, and I want them to have a legacy, I want something to be left there once I've gone. And for that reason, I will gift my books to this particular community. Now, that is again a very human sentiment, but to what extent those collections turn into successful libraries is an entirely different story that I'm sure Andrew wants to say a few words on. >> Andrew Pettegree: Yes. I mean, I just want to -- I just [inaudible] something that Arthur has said, and that is people treat the public library as a forever thing, and they fight to keep it open on the basis that it's been always with us. But in fact, the public library as we know it is really part of a sort of vanishingly small part of library history. You could say from about 1885 when Carnegie got started with his donations to the UK and the US of many, many local libraries until about the first economic problems of the late 1960s, when even at that point libraries were under severe pressure. So the public library has not always been with us. And you can think of the first five centuries of print in a way as struggling to find a model of a community ownership of books, which was continually thwarted one by this great man phenomenon of someone trying to memorialize their lives through books, where of course, an inherited collection is not necessarily to the taste of succeeding generations. And that's why, instead, as we discovered when we were working on auction catalogs, the family that had inherited the library often found it more of a millstone than an adornment to their own houses, so they just put it out to market so they had to have the money back to either buy their own books or buy fine wine or horses, whatever they chose. Then you have the university library, which often was more intent on repelling student borrowers, rather than welcoming them through their doors. And we reach a point in the 17th century where professors in library -- in universities often have more books than are in the university library, which is an astonishing thought today, but this was indeed true. People built their own collection around the books they wanted. And so these books -- these university libraries, then the libraries inherited from the French Revolution could easily find themselves just funeral pyres of unwanted books. And that's the problem. The greatest enemy of libraries is not the ignorance of their curators or bombing, the greatest enemy of libraries is modernity, and that is the people want the books of their own time, rather than the inherited remains of previous generations or even 10 years ago. As, you know, any librarian working in a public library will tell you, an important part of their work is following principles about what to keep and what to dispose of. And Arthur mentioned that we bought a lot of books during lock time, is true. And I think collectively we bought books from organization called Better World Books, very often. And I think we now have items from about 50 institutional collections. And it's quite interesting for history of library -- of libraries to see where they've all come from. >> Jane Kamensky: Yes. I would say the same thing about my shelves, right? I'm filled -- my shelves are filled with the accession books bought through the miraculous surfacing of small collections on the worldwide web. And when I retire, my students don't want them, right. I mean, the -- this question, and you express it so beautifully in the book, that nobody cares as much about a collection as the person who assembled it. So you've opened this vein about loss which I think is a sort of wide river through the book and the particular sub species of loss that's obsolescence in various ways. Let's stay there for a moment and talk about loss and obsolescence, and then maybe we can move a little bit to a solution space and hear what you think we ought to be doing about it. >> Andrew Pettegree: Yeah, [multiple speakers]. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Sorry, [multiple speakers]. All right -- >> Andrew Pettegree: Now, [multiple speakers]. >> Andrew Pettegree: Obsolescence, wow, this is the problem which faced all university libraries in the early modern period, because so much of their initial collection was put together after their affirmation, particularly in Protestant countries, by the books taken from monastic libraries and other religious institutions. And they were too valuable to throw away, but it was hard to find a clientele for reading them. This is true also on many of the parish libraries, which were often specified not as a library for the citizens of the town, but as a collective reference library for the clergy of the county or the locality. Well, if you've got a collection like that, that isn't going to get much used. We have to remember that what we think of as the necessary normal and obvious way of storing books that is shelving, is only really coming into general use in the 16th and 17th centuries. So, before this, books are mostly kept in chests along with other valuables. And in the manuscript age, you might have 10, 15, 20 books, so you could generally find them in your chest. But with the coming of prints at the point that people can buy much more widely, that's obviously not a very good way of keeping books if you won't to have any way of finding your way back to your books. So, this means that we have a convention growing up that shelving is the way to keep books, but then they're more obviously unsafe. And that means that not only do you have books which no one particularly will want to read, but you also have the difficult of curating commonly held valuables. So, this is a very difficult situation which results with some very ingenious ways of other forms of community resource. The subscription libraries are one of them. That is a group of friends band together to in effect pool a collection. And they create the rules by which they will be able to borrow books, and they also create the -- they have a common view of what they will buy. So, these are very successful, but they're quite exclusive and quite excluding. For other sorts of customers, we have circulating libraries, which are marvelous institutions, where basically they're commercial libraries, very often known by bookshops, where for either an annual fee or a modest per book fee, you can go and get the sort of books you want. Now, what we found really interesting is that these circulating libraries actually live on into the second half of the 20th century. They're not killed by the public library. Because when you go to a circulating library, you can be sure of the latest fiction however lowbrow, and you cannot be sure of that in public libraries. Because from the late 19th century onwards, libraries, public libraries thought they had a duty to instruct and educate their clients rather than just allow them to find books for their own enjoyment. And that was actually something of a liability for the public library movement and one it took a long time to grow out of. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Now loss is an incredibly important part of history. And I mean, there is a reason we've called it a fragile history. Now this is precisely because, you know, the concept of the library has always been that. And that's not going to go away either. But I think it's important to recognize that almost all libraries that have existed throughout human history are no longer with us. And indeed, most libraries that are established, you know, they don't live on for much more than a few decades after the first person who assembled it. And I mean, a part of this simply has to do with modes of production too. If we're thinking about the lost Library of Alexandria that so many of our great collectors look to us, this universal encyclopedic ideal they want to recreate. It's important to remember that, you know, Library of Alexandria was filled with papyrus scrolls, which had they not been recopied every two centuries or so, would have most likely deteriorated on their own. And this is something you see too with the invention of printing that just makes books so much more abundant and cheaper and diverse. It also means those books lose their value as prestige objects and should be kept and treasured at all cost. As you know, the more books are out there, the easier it is to build new libraries, which also means that it doesn't matter as much if the library of a previous generation isn't cherished as much. And this is something you see too in, you know, moments of immense destruction that people who value books are often those who are behind great book purchase. And if we think of the Enlightenment, for example, you know, it will be responsible for many of our current ideals that we look to in terms of democracy and literacy and human rights. But the period of the Enlightenment was also one of the most destructive when it came to libraries. And indeed, there were probably more libraries destroyed during the late 18th century and early 19th century than -- ever before in human history up till about the 20th century. So the fragility is always there. >> Jane Kamensky: Thanks for that. And I had wanted to talk about that fragile history. Arthur, you remind me of a line in the book you're talking about one of the library proliferation schemes of the late 18th and early 19th century. And you referred to James Kirkwood and others as "pilgrims" searching for the lost Library of Alexandria. And that's a theme, right? We're all in some ways pilgrims searching for the lost Library of Alexandria. So, on the one hand, you write about irony is a word that already has come up, I think it's a story full of ironies and unintended consequences. The way you've described this history so far makes me want to ask the two of you -- are you two pilgrims looking for the lost Library of Alexandria? I mean, when you think of the necessity of curation and the sedimenting out of the old and unused for the new and desperately wanted, what do you -- I guess two parts of you, you know, what does your head wish for? What would you say to your university library? And then what does your heart long for as you look at those auction catalogues for collections that you and the periods of your greatest scholarly expertise can't see? >> Arthur der Weduwen: Now that's a very good question. I mean, in some ways, it's a question of access to texts, first of all. And other thing that -- that is what a lot of people will be looking for when it comes to the libraries and indeed, what people will often look for. You know, this is the case or gamble with Erasmus in the 16th century. He wasn't intent on showing off about his books. He was already famous, but he wanted access to texts. And I think that is a principle that many libraries today uphold. You know, there's attempt of saying, "Look, we know we can't keep everything." We can't keep everything everywhere either. So, things like consortia of libraries that bound together to ensure that at least one of them always has a particular text or a particular edition of the text. That is something that I think is becoming much more common and, in some ways, goes back to this Alexandrian ideal. But we know we cannot have everything in one place. But we can at least try to facilitate researchers or anyone who wishes to access literature on that particular basis. I think that is probably the most important principle. When it comes to, you know, looking at the past and thinking about all the things we've lost, yes, I mean, we're pretty greedy. I'm sure every collector is truly in their heart a greedy person because they always want a little bit more. They want more of what they cannot have and can't access. So, you know, I would give a lot to be able to born around the streets of 17th century Amsterdam and peek into people's houses to see what they have on their shelves. But it's also, I think, you should just as a historian, you sort of reconcile yourself with the fact that you should always be searching. But the best things you tend to find or discover are the things you're not necessarily looking for in the first place. Always keeping an open mind like that, I think, is important. >> Andrew Pettegree: I should say Arthur is a genuine collector and he's put together a very nice collection of 17th century books. I suppose I've poured my collecting instinct into the Universal Short Title Catalogue and collected by collecting references to books. I should say one of the more magical things we're trying to do at the moment is where these auction catalogs come in, to reconstruct the world of lost books, that is books that we know to have been published but no library today has yet declared that they have a copy of it. And this is fabulously rewarding. It's such fun to find these books which we can only find in references or in newspaper advertisements, or in modern bibliographies of libraries which have now disappeared for one reason or another. So that's enough to state my collecting instinct, and otherwise, I just have a pragmatic collection. As far as my head and my heart are concerned, there is two aspects of this, one, my own preferences and the other, my students' needs. And here, I sort of both welcome -- I suppose I'm like everybody. I welcome a digital change and have used it greedily. I consult digital resources every day. But I also worry about their implications for learning. And whether material read on screen is as easily retained as the printed version of a book because there is something special about the relationship between the hands and the eyes and the head and the book, which I don't think you can recreate by scrolling. After all, you know, all those papyruses were on scrolls. And we got rid of them because it's actually a terrible way of consulting a text. With a papyrus, you can only read it one way. With a codex, a book, you can read it anyway. You can consult it. And I feel rather the same about a text on Kindle, which, you know, it's extremely difficult to manipulate. So my student -- COVID, I think digital resources actually had a pretty good pandemic. Students were able to continue to work even when the library was closed. But we're betting enough -- a lot on the sustainability of resources which are very new. When you think of some of the protectors to the throne of the book -- pretenders to the throne of the book, like the microfilm, or the CD-ROM, those have come and gone really in the time that the book was meant to be dead. And then along came digital and people said, "That's the end of the book." But I can tell you all that I think 90% of the copies of this book which will be purchased will be the print edition rather than the audio book, which is by the way beautifully read by Sean Barrett, or indeed the Kindle version. Because people want to have a copy of a book like this. It's in a way almost too long to be read on an iReader [phonetic] of any sort. And you know, what happens when the electricity goes off? Are we so secure in our belief in the long-term sustainability of our energy sources that we should be doing away with print? Or in 20 years' time, are people going to come knocking on my door holding their candles and saying, "Can I borrow a copy of the book?" >> Jane Kamensky: Yes. No, I agree with you on both the head and the heart side. And when the New York Public asked me to do this and sent me a PDF, I said, "Please send me a printed book." >> Andrew Pettegree: Oh. >> Jane Kamensky: I think we may need the neuroscientists as allies in this work, right, especially in elite university campuses, where thinking about that proxemics, and about the physiology of learning from the hand and the eye could be very powerful. I see that we're moving to audience questions soon. And I guess I want to give you one more thing to chew on from me before we do, which is to ask you to anticipate what I'm sure will be on the minds of the audience, what does it mean for a library to be ambitious today? >> Andrew Pettegree: I think for a library to be ambitious, they have to be brave. And they have to be brave, which might involve throwing out some very strongly held pieties. And welcoming readers back in to do a lot of things which have nothing to do with the book. This is what a lot of our main municipal libraries in the UK are doing. They're redesigning their space to provide for more communal space, more meeting space, more places where you can talk. I think the saying goodbye to the cathedral silence, which sort of crept into the libraries from the mediaeval monasteries, and then was adopted by Sir Thomas Bodley for his Bodleian Library. I think we can say goodbye to that without a great deal of sadness. I very much prefer the renaissance model of the library, where the great man brings in his friends and they have glass of wine, look over the books. And I can't see why all these things couldn't work together. And in way bookshops have demonstrated it by putting a coffee shop right in the middle of a bookshop. And it seems such an obvious coupling now. But it was brave when people first did that. And I think libraries have very often already followed down that path, and I think that's where ambition lies. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Yeah, and I would add that certainly browsability, and not skimping on shelves, and allowing people to browse, I think will be -- it will be an ambitious thing to do because it demands a lot of physical space. It demands a little bit of attention to what you put on shelves. But ensuring that people have the true sort of freedom to browse as many books as possible in person, I think will be immensely welcome to many patrons of libraries. And we'll see many more people use libraries too. Because that is something that, you know, it's so essential to the enjoyment of the library is that sort of random -- happening upon a book you never knew existed or being able to chase up a subject from one book to the next. So I think that is an ambition that will be interesting to see libraries follow. And secondly also, just, you know, taking care of the people who are already there. And perhaps, you know, and this might seem counterintuitive as an ambition, but not necessarily falling in the trap of needing to be encyclopedic. Not every library needs to be an Alexandria. If it has a specialism in something particular, embracing that specialism may be another good way to really stake a claim for the importance of a particular institution. >> Jane Kamensky: Thanks for that. And we have some wonderful follow up energy coming in from the audience. One question that takes us in a direction that you briefly touched on, but we should dive into is sort of more deliberate threats to books. And this questioner asks particularly about banned books. Now that we find ourselves in a sort of new chapter of the forever unfolding library wars in the United States, so talk a little bit about the history of banned books. And what do we do to protect things that are under threat in the sort of politicized space of the library? >> Arthur der Weduwen: Yeah. >> Andrew Pettegree: Well, there has always been censorship of books. There has always been people wanting to control book since the beginning of printing and then more intensively, of course, when the religious continent of Christendom divided into two, Protestant and Catholic. I think of three ages of library censorship. Firstly, in the first age when, to a large extent, the pressures for control on books came from within the industry itself. It wasn't necessarily a top-down thing. It was the producers wanted the guarantee of a monopoly on the publication of particular texts. And also self-censorship was very important. They wanted to get on with their local authorities. So it was very, very rare to find anything critical of the local government published locally. And then, we get to a more modern era, and we get a new movement. And that's a new sort of control. And that is this determination in the new public libraries that they should be educational. Libraries would justify that use of public funds was justified on the grounds that you had this -- beginning of universal education, and you had a new industrial class coming into the cities. So libraries was thought of as essential to fitting this new population to their role in democracies. So that didn't necessarily mean that they could hope to get the sort of books they wanted for recreation in their libraries, but it was full of improving material. And that is why people went instead to the circulating libraries, so called company libraries, where they could get the sort of thrillers and westerns and things that they actually want to do in their all too precious leisure time. And it was really until the 1970s, when the library movement, public library movement had had a terrible shock with the paperback, which of course, empowered so many people to go out and buy the things they wanted instead of going to libraries. And then -- so they sort of, to some extent, libraries cave in and buy more recreational material. And then you get this third way, which I think is strongest in the United States, where the pressures on contents come not from the library staff, but from the patrons. And often you see occasions where books are removed from libraries often on the basis of one anonymous complaint. And I wonder if we're reaching now, sort of potential fourth wave, where instead of books being removed because of their content, whether there's violence or obscenity or offence to religion, books may now begin to be removed because of their author. Now I don't think we're there yet in the United Kingdom. But the removal of books which themselves are relatively harmless, but where the opinions and statements of the author are objected to, that might be coming down the road next. >> Arthur der Weduwen: I mean libraries -- >> Jane Kamensky: Well, that's so brave. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Sorry, Jane. >> Jane Kamensky: Go ahead [laughs]. >> Arthur der Weduwen: No, I just wanted to say libraries are incredibly political spaces. But it's also worth remembering that, you know, book banning and excluding certain types of literature from libraries will always be with us. But it's important to recognize that those are not necessarily always effective attempts at eradicating books. >> Andrew Pettegree: Yeah. >> Arthur der Weduwen: I mean, it's very easy for authorities or for librarians or leaders and essential patrons to say, "You know, I want these books out of our public libraries, out of the university library." But getting rid of books from private homes and personal collectors is incredibly difficult. And to give you just but one example from the 20th century, the work of a very famous Czech writer, Milan Kundera, who wrote a book called The Joke in the 1960s. Well, it was over 119,000 copies were produced in the years after publication, very popular. But then he was expelled from the Communist Party. And indeed 19,000 copies of this work were removed from Czech libraries. But that's still left 100,000 copies in circulation, in private hands in Czech Republic. And this is something you see a lot when, you know, certain types of literature go out of fashion or are banned. Yes, they may be retreating out of public eye, but they won't necessarily be retreating out of people's minds and indeed, their homes. >> Jane Kamensky: So Andrew has terrified us and Arthur has reassured us. And the universe is right in its balanced yet. A question about loss from an audience member who writes as Jean-Philippe de Tonnac has said, "Culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten." And this questioner wonders what you have learned from the various institutions and professions dedicated to that preserving work for print editors, publishers, libraries. How does that translate to the work of digital curation and preservation? >> Arthur der Weduwen: Well, very good question. I mean, first of all, I think it's again worth emphasizing that it's incredibly difficult for anyone, for any generation to know what future generations will be interested in and will enjoy. And I think that's always been the struggle of curators in deciding to say, you know, what are we going to keep? What will be of interest? And, you know, this is some of the stories we've sort of already hinted at. Andrew talking about the microfilm, for example, with so many American libraries in the middle of the 20th century throwing away the hard copies of 19th century newspapers [inaudible] on microfilm, because this was a way to save space. And this would be of much better use for future researchers. Well now, those newspapers are all gone and the microfilms are often unreadable. So, you know, any age deciding what people will enjoy in the future, it's the same with -- I mean, we worked a lot with old, printed books. And there was a real fashion in the 19th century to have these washed, to have them as clean copy as possible in libraries. Because surely, that would be the version that would be of use for future researchers because they have a nice clean copy to read text from. Well, these days, so many scholars will be interested in annotations, marks of provenance that say something about the reception or circulation of texts. So really you want the dirtiest copy as possible, not the cleanest. But you know, what the scholars will want to prove through 100 years' time is incredibly difficult to decipher right now. And yes, it's certainly, in terms of the digital revolution, you know. How do we store or keep the huge amounts of content we are generating every single day? It's a massive challenge. >> Andrew Pettegree: Yeah, I think one of the things that we do in St. Andrews is we spend an awful lot of time on the ugly ducklings. That is, you know, small books which haven't particularly been valued in library culture but were incredibly popular in their own day. And so we're often used to death because they were often sort of thumbed and they were in daily consultation. Whereas the sort of great folios, the great sort of text which fill the libraries of every major international, national and university collection often survive so well, because they actually weren't that much consulted at the time. So there is almost an inverse relationship between survival and contemporary importance. I see Arthur has -- >> Jane Kamensky: Arthur has an exhibit [brief laughter]. >> Arthur der Weduwen: This is Exhibit A for this evening. I think there will only be one, but this is exactly the point Andrew has made. I have here a 17th century broadsheet, a placard, printed in 1673. It's a poem written on the death of a Dutch admiral at sea. There is only one other copy of this broadsheet in the world today. But this is exactly the sort of item that would have been printed in about 500 or 1,000 copies that would have been circulating after every naval battle or joyous occasion that something would have been stuck up in taverns, handed out, enjoyed by people. So, you know, print or a form of a book has immense reach and appeal. But there are so many, like Andrew said, so many great books that will survive in hundreds of copies of data have survived because they've largely been unread and sat on library shelves. >> Jane Kamensky: So I think we have time for just one more question. And an audience member has asked about great private libraries that survive and thrive. The audience member hasn't said this but I'll say, in seeming defiance of the norm that you've given us that collections mean the most to their collector, the questioner points to the Morgan Library as one. You could come up with others and maybe we'll, in our last minutes here, what's their particular alchemy and norm defining alchemy? >> Andrew Pettegree: Well, when you've mentioned the Morgan or the Folger, you're dealing with collectors at such an elevated level in terms of their resources and their enthusiasm for books that -- vanishingly small number. I think there are opportunities now for people with precious but medium sized collections to ensure that they're looking after them. And often, it's in bibliographical societies like The Grolier Club in New York, where I think they have many bibliophilic collectors there, who will hope to pass on their collection to The Grolier Club. And often they're very carefully accumulated collections with a very interesting specialism. And that's one of the things which has interested me as an observer of this is that, if you define your specialism very carefully, there is often quite a lot out there which you can bring into the collection, you can make an extremely interesting collection still. I have to say that our resource, The Universal Short Title Catalogue does allow personal collectors to have their collections listed on our resource. But personal collections are inherently unstable because you may have a copy which you think is in a personal collection. And then there is a newly accession copy in let's say Beinecke and Yale, and that might actually just be the same book, just finding a sort of safe harbor at the end of its journey. >> Arthur der Weduwen: I would say that, you know, for personal libraries to survive, I mean, having lots of money available, certainly for things like an endowment, and a building, you know. And we see the best success is those libraries where the founder is already involved during their lifetime in setting this up. But as the 17th century library theorist, Gabriel Naude has said, you know, one of the best ways to keep your library going and to acquire books is simply to tell people, "You're a great collector," because then they will send books your way. And this is exactly what happened with Thomas Botley in Oxford in the 17th century, is as soon as people realize what he was up to, constructing this wonderful new massive university library, he started receiving gifts from many people in his political circles to say, "Oh, you know, I have some manuscripts you might be interested in. I'll send them your way." And this is exactly what great institutions like the Morgan or the Folger have today because they have an endowment, because they're already on the map. People will go to them and come to them with further gifts of both money that allows the acquisition of new books and stuff, but also of course, the books themselves. >> Jane Kamensky: Well, I want to thank you both so much for a delightful conversation and a delightful book. I hope we've left the audience wanting more to be found in these pages and thinking differently about the books and spaces that we care so much about in our daily lives. So congratulations on a monumental achievement. I look forward to reading more from both of you. And thank you for the audience for joining us today. >> Andrew Pettegree: Thank you, Jane. This has been a real pleasure. >> Arthur der Weduwen: Thank you very much, Jane and Andrew. Really nice to speak with you today. >> Jane Kamensky: Cheers. >> Female Speaker: Thank you for joining us. For more information and to register for upcoming programs, visit nypl.org/live.