Essays on the History of Trinity College Library Dublin

Citation

Guilding, P. (2001), "Essays on the History of Trinity College Library Dublin", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 6, pp. 310-311. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.6.310.1

Contents: Vincent Kinane, “Legal deposit 1901‐1922”; Peter Fox, “The librarians of Trinity College”; Linda Ferguson, “Custodes librorum: services, staff and salaries, 1601‐1855”; Elizabethanne Boran, “The function of the library in the early sixteenth century”; Anthony Cains, “The long room survey of sixteenth and seventeenth century books of the first collections”; Brendan Grimes, “The library buildings up to 1970”; Jane Maxwell, “Guide to manuscript sources in TCD for the history of the library”; William O’Sullivan, “John Madden’s manuscripts”; Bernard Meehan, “Lost and found: a stray of the thirteenth century from Trinity College Dublin”; Anne Walsh, “The library as revealed in the parliamentary Commission Report of 1853”; V. Koeper‐Saul, “The study of German in TCD and the acquisition of German language works by the library in the nineteenth century”; Ciaran Nicholson and Ann O’Brien, “A select bibliography of the library”; Ciaran Nicholson, “A selection of published illustrations relating to the library”; Isolde Harpur, “A select chronology”.

This collection represents the first instalment of an undertaking to remedy the problem of the relative paucity of writings on the history of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) Library. This has only become possible since the college muniments became easily accessible in 1969; their subsequent cataloguing has made the task of research much less laborious and has permitted this first “significant step towards providing the foundations which will enable a full scholarly history of the library to be undertaken” (Introduction).

The contributors, for the most part past or present members of staff of TCD, have concentrated at the request of the editors on the mechanics of the library’s operations rather than its extensive collections which are catered for elsewhere (in fact there is quite a lot of detail on the collections as well, particularly on the manuscript collections and the use of the library as a bibliographic “arsenal in the confessional wars”). Their essays cover a variety of core topics from the function of the library to the nuts and bolts of staffing and services, and take us into the daily working lives of the junior fellows, porters, cleaning maids and clerks who staffed the library and the “packs of trash” they unpacked, the vacuum dusting machine they cleaned with and the speaking tubes they communicated with.

The legal side of the library’s privileges and responsibilities is well represented by the essays on legal deposit and the 1853 Parliamentary Commission Report which afford a wealth of fascinating detail on borrowing rights, reading habits, the attitude of some academics to legal deposit (fulminations against “merely ephemeral novels, children’s books and other insignificant publications”), selection and claiming policies for legal deposit material and storage solutions, including the barely‐concealed consignment of parliamentary papers to Drimnagh Paper Mill and novels to hospitals and army barracks.

Some of the contributions break new ground – Anthony Cains’ essay on retail bindings of the sixteenth and first decade of seventeenth century (illustrated by 16 plates) describes a survey to identify surviving books of the first collections and the consequent discovery of books from John Dee’s Library. Others accumulate and expand already‐existing knowledge, for instance the history of the library buildings and some of the narrow architectural escapes down the years. It might be objected there is little on the history of the library in the twentieth century and this is indeed the case; but perhaps the last century is a little too recent. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the watersheds of 1732, 1801 and 1861 are well served; the twentieth must wait its turn. Although there are examples of malpractice, neglect and ignorance, the vista on the whole as one looks back over the centuries is one of sound management, prudence and pursuit of civilised values.

This preliminary trawling through the muniments has unearthed a variety of little gems and it is hoped that future methodical sorting of the wheat from the chaff will result in a definitive history of the library. Some useful spadework – including a list of librarians, a chronology of the library, a select list of published illustrations and a resume of the muniments catalogues – has laid the foundations on which future researchers will surely build. A bibliography and index rounds off this work most satisfactorily.