LIBRARY AND CATALOGUE OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
A 'VISIT to the -Reading Room is a trial of patience ; and a person entering for a literary purpose is likely to have his tranquillity disturbed at the outset. If he enters in the middle of the day, he finds himself at once in the midst of all the stir, buz, and noisome- ness of a crowded school, with which quiet thought and content- ment are impossible. From the first it is the commencement of a Chancery suit, and he must begin with written documents. las eye is directed towards the Catalogue-desk, thronged with eager suitors ; and, to his dismay, he may find the volume in hand to-which he wanted to refer. As there is only one Catalogue for alt and no fixed time for anything, except the closing and open- ing of the doors, he may by this mischance be delayed five minutes or fifty. -He grasps at last the desired folio, an upstanding at the desk, begins coursing up and down the long pages of inter- leaved print and writing ulnae finds the titleiof the book he is in quest of. This he must carefully copy in full into a printed sche- dule with columns and cross-lines like an income-tax or assessed- tax paper. In filling up this instrument he is liable to grave mis- takes. On the margin of the -Catalogue are signs or fractional figures called " press marks," and which he may easily take for private marks that do not concern him ; they are, in fact, private marks, meant to direct the attendants to the room, shelf, or place, where a book may be found : if .any of these be omitted or mis- written, or any word, date, name, or prefix of the author,—which is very likely if the applicant be a novice,—then no notice is taken of him; he is left to his own unaided meditations and conclusions, like a blundering schoolboy—a derisive spectacle to all in the secret of his perplexities. Such is the law of the place; it is Mr. Panizzi's law,—well adapted, perhaps, to punish carelessness in a ladies' seminary or academy of juveniles, but quite unsuited to a resort into which none but adults are admitted, and they mostly of .a select and considerate class, willing, if previously apprized, to observe any needful precautionary institutes.
Most of these commencing disagreeables might be easily met or alleviated without compromising the securities essential in the na- tional repository. All that seems most requisite is more space ; for special cases, such facilities for quiet and isolation as may be found in similar but better-arranged establishments ; next, better sanatory regulations, particularly ventilation ; and lastly, and above all, a compendious printed catalogue. This is'the common cry of Professor Owen, Mr. Ether, Mr. Carlyle, Mr. Gray,* Mr. `Tomlinson, and all the literary witnesses examined,—with the ex- ception perhaps of Mr. John Wilson Croker, who is exempt from the common room, and allowed to commune with himself, with a...large spread of books before him, in an adjoining parlour. With this solitary exception, the absence of a general printed catalogue is felt to be the chief obstructive deficiency of the library : but, strange to say, it is declared to be an impossibility, and, lament- able to add, the Comraissioners, nose-led by Mr. Panizzi and,the ex-Secretary of the Admiralty, backed by thie foregone misgivings of certain Trustees, have acquiesced in the impotent canc].siora.
Against such determination we resolutely appeal, authorized both by what has been done in the Museum and what is daily doing elsewhere. The printed catalogue of Messrs. Ellis and Esther answered very well till it was buried-underethe new inser- tions, and swelled out from seven octavo volumes into forty.foTio volumes; but no good reason exists why. there should not be a new edition of this, as of other works, with improvements and on an amended plan. It is no reason against suc.h revised reprint that there are no printed catalogues attached to the great libraries of the Continent: in no other place like this metropolis are there equally ready facilities of capital, printing power; and literary aid to be had. Neither is it a valid objection against a new catalogue, that the yearly accumulation of fresh publications would soon render et comparatively valueless. Ought a merchant to forbear talzrsw stock this year because he will have a larger aocinaulation next.? This bugbear of new publications may be easily met. Print :a yearly alphabetical catalogue of them, and then ,any work that has appeared subsequent to the date of the general catalogue may be easily found in these supplemental volumes, from knownag the year in which it was published, always ascertainable of recent -works from the booksellers.
The chief difficulties in the way of a printed catalogue, and its eontemplated defects if completed, arise from the badness of the schemes projected. Of. mousse, if a catalogue is to be ten or twenty years in elaboration, a new museum of books will have Accu- mulated by the time it is finished. But is this protracted gesta- tion unavoidable? 'It is more tedious than Mr. Weekes's new pro- cess of animal generation by the galvanic battery. Let us try it by figures. The present octavo catalogue is inseven volumes, and con- tains 110,000 insertions. The number of -works in the library have ;since 1819 increased fourfold, and amount to near half a million. Suppose now, for despatch and immediate use, a catalogue were im- provised on the scale of Ellis and Co. in thirty octavo voluinee would not that suffice? Would it not be better than wiling in- terminably for the consummation of Mr. _Paniezi's .ambitious im- practicability ? And does any one acquainted with the present resources of London believe, that such a catalogue, under the di- rection of a practical and organizing intellect, might not be com- piled, printed, and published in twelve or eighteen months ? Is a catalogue of the Museum Library a, greater task than Johoscm's .Dictionary, executed by him single-handed, assisted only by five or six Scotehmen ? Yearly some thirty or forty volumes of " blue looks" are turned oat ; their materials eolleoted, debated, ar- ranged, indexed, and delivered to Members and subscribers. There is, too, the Times newspaper for encouragement Here, by seam extraordinary combination of intellectual and mechanical powers, diversified matters enough to fill a fair-sized volume are col- lected, classed, and digested, every night. Since Mr. Panizzi be- gan, we have had one or two censuses of the population, cata- loguing twenty-four millions of people, their ages, sexes, @coupe- , tions, and houses. Surely the Museum teak is not more onerous than this, or the other annual and daily tolls adverted to ?
Our wish is not to undervalue the endeavours of the Keeper of
* Mr. Gray has contributed some very genalible •remarks on the library and_the Catalogue, in a pamphlet publighed since the appearance of the erect blue book. the Printed Books. Mr. Panizzi is a zealous officer, possessed of ability ,and industry ; but he is not free from human infirmity. He lid ks and in fact says, that men of science are opinion- ative, crotchety, narrow-minded: but he is himself of limited pur- view, somewhat exclusive too, if not tuft-hunting. His taste in literature is bibliographical; he thinks that rare and costly books are preferable for the Museum to modern books, and advises pur- chases accordingly : but this is not the national taste, and we doubt whether it is the national purpose of the repertory. However, we will not differ 'widely on this ground, for we would have bath classes of books, if we could get at them. But as to the specific hobby Mr. Panizzi is riding, we are convinced he is fundamentally wrong : his catalogue may be a good bibliographical catalogue--we don't deny it; it may be a valuable descriptive inventory, worth all its cost to the Museum—that we are ready to concede : bot it is not the article that is forthcoming and in immediate need. That which 'the public urgently calls for is a compendious catalogue on tht scale prescribed, containing just enough to distinguish one hook, its size, author, and date, from another, and so simply arranged as to be intelligible at first sight without previous thought or expla- nation. Upon the face of it Mr. Panizzi's plan does not approxi- mate to this desideratum. What must be the complications of a catalogue based upon ninety-one rules of construction, many of them so subtile that Lord Stanley was immersed in a brown study for an hour—some say two—over them, and then rose with a hope- less or hysterical laugh at their incomprehensibility.
A watch or a spinning-jenny offers no refinements to match a structure of Such multifarious conditions. Some of the headings or classifications appear to us, in common with others, objectionable —instructive to read they may be to literary connoisseurs, but not apt indices for general use. " Arouet," the Christian or family name of Voltaire, is the title under which the philosopher must be sought, not the name by which he is universally known : this forms one instance of Mr. Panizzi's novel perplexities of arrangement. A. B., a Dialogue between Two Country Gentlemen," is another ; which must be found by looking for " A," the initial substantive, not " Dialogue " or " Country Gentlemen," the substantive words of the title. In the omission of articles and prepositions, and in taking for anonymous -works the first noun in the title of a book without regard to its significancy, we think Mr. Panizzi deviates both from nature and usage. If people want an account of anything—a great battle or a great earthquake, for example—the significant word, not its allocation, the name of the place where a battle was fought or an earthquake happened, is always uppermost in the mind, and, agreeably with constant practice, guides the search in index, gazetteer, or encyclopedia. A different rule in the cata- logue presents something new and simple, but in our estimate not an improvement. Next, as to copying the titles in full. Why, the titling of books is mere caprice of taste or fashion. For the last thirty years short titles have been in vogue ; previously, long titles were the rage, and authors or their booksellers used to cram as much into the titlepage as it would hold : so that books printed anterior to the present century will fill double, treble, or ten times the space of books printed subsequently, and that without reference to their rarity, worth, usefulness, or any other rational standard of value and intellectual appreciation.
But we may be taking needless trouble, by Mr. Panizzi's labours sharing the fate of those of the Reverend Mr. Horne, which have been quietly shelved. They have certainly the drawback of hold- ing out no definite term for completion. According to the Keeper's own report, the word " Gardiner" has only been reached ; end lour years more, in addition to the ten already spent, will be requisite, leaving then sixteen years' arrear of books uneatalogued, amounting to 400,000 volumes at the present annual rate of accu- mulation. And still the index of subjects will be to begin u on ; And without an index Mr. Panizzi himself holds his undertaking ,cheap and of little use.
In spite of this cheerless prospect, we repeat, persevere; or only let the work be suspended till a compendious catalogue has been improvised on the scale and within the time already mentioned. How this should be set about and executed, we will succinctly state. Let the books first pass through the hands of literary and scientific men, 'or Mr. Panizzi's manuscript titles might be used so far as they have been written out ; these first operatives using the printer's signs known to authors, and a pencil to prevent damage to the books or MSS., to mark the significant or initial word of the title to stand first in the catalogue, and to dele all redundant words or items : next, the books to be passed to copyists to write out the titles so prepared and condensed. After this comes the alphabetical arrangement; in which the eourse with index-makers is different, but the following is a simple one. Take the written lists of titles, cut off each title, 'and distribute all with the same initial letter in its first word into the same box or compartment, in the same way as printers distri- bute .tyre: next each letter, A or B, so collected under separate .subdivisions, must be dealt with by being taken out of its com- partment, and the initial words of each title ranged on a table in the order of the alphabet of their second or third letters : this -done, the titles, in the order so arranged, are pasted on slips of paper, read over for correction, and are then ready for the printer. In this way might a catalogue be made to start into life, supposing it placed wider energetic and competent direction, and the mechani- cal work done by contract, long before the close of A.D. 1851.
Previous page
