St. Paul's Cathedral Library

When I first received the syllabus for the British Studies Program, due to my late arrival I would have missed the tour at the library at St. Paul’s Cathedral. I’m grateful the schedule was changed because it was a very interesting tour and one I found to be different from the others.

Our tour guide Joseph Wisdom was a large part of the reason I enjoyed this particular library as much as I did (the same could be said about our docent at the Bodleian Library). Always proper and polite, he also possessed the wittiness and dry sense of humor I admire in Brits. I was reminded of my tour guide at the Library of Congress, Tom Mann, who for the past two years had given my school a tour at the LOC. His candor, sarcasm and intelligent humor added much to the tour.

Early in our tour Mr. Wisdom explained to us a vital, yet difficult part of his job, which many archival librarians could likely relate. He stated that there is a constant need to balance the wishes of the institution with the integrity of the collection. If the institution wants to display items, it is the job of Mr. Wisdom and others in his department to determine if the conditions are right to preserve the materials while on exhibition. If not, he explained that sometimes you have to put your neck on the line if a request won’t work, not an easy thing to do but critical to protect the items.

One of two entrances to the library

A unique item of St. Paul’s, although apparently not for cathedrals, was the lapidarium, a collection of the broken stone pieces of the cathedral. I’d never seen anything like this before but found it fascinating. These broken bits have been stored here spanning back centuries, numbered and labeled by type of architecture and time period (Norman, Gothic, etc.). As respectfully requested I am unable to share the picture I took but this was one of my favorite parts of the tour.

The library consists of two rooms, one in the north tower and one in the south tower. The north tower is not a traditional library with books but rather more of an archival room. The most impressive piece here was Christopher Wren’s “The Great Model”, a 1:24 scale wooden model of what Wren actually wanted to build as St. Paul’s after the Great Fire of 1666. Based on the design I was instantly reminded of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which I had visited in 2011. Clearly I wasn’t the first to think this – the design had been rejected by the clergy and others at the time for that very reason – too much like St. Peter’s and too Catholic! The desire was for a more traditional English church with a spire and Latin Cross.

The library in the south tower, much to the group’s pleasure, looked and smelled like a library (I think I was not alone in learning that lovely bookish aroma is really the smell of decaying leather). Dimly lit, crammed with books and items and with no others on staff at the time we were there, it almost had a forgotten feel to it, as if we had stumbled upon a secret room full of ancient mysteries. Although it didn’t appear to be climate controlled, Mr. Wisdom told us that this library was closely monitored for variations in humidity, temperature and dust. In fact, he almost made it sound that it was ridiculously scrutinized – measured with groups, without groups, with the door open, with the door closed, so that it is even known that the most dust is not around the books but at the door, where people are entering and exiting. Despite all the monitoring of conditions, Mr. Wisdom said both the books and chamber holding them need conservation, in particular the room, which was in worse shape than the books themselves. The holdings include three volumes that survived the Great Fire and 2,000 books given by the Bishop of London to rebuild the library after the fire. Anyone who can make good use of the library is allowed to use it and many like to trace their ancestry back to the Cathedral. I was chosen to show the wrong way to remove a rare book from the shelf – I knew I would not be able to do so correctly without guidance but couldn’t figure out the proper way on the spot. Helpful hint to future students: Do not pull down from the top of the spine but rather push in the books on either side and grab the intended volume by the middle by holding both parts of the spine. Also be sure to hold the underside in case it has a lead bottom! The items are not classified – the organization method is small books on top, big books on bottom. This seems to be a not uncommon practice in the UK, but I’ve noticed they are really quite good at making the most of small spaces.

The library in the south tower, courtesy of St. Paul's website

One interesting concept Mr. Wisdom provided was that the specialization of libraries into libraries, museums, archives, etc., is a recent concept. In the past, all of these sorts of things would have been together (the British Library is evidence of this, considering that the Museum and Library only split in the 1990’s). He noted that in specializing, we lose the history of a collection. I got the impression (simply my opinion) that we sometimes take this specialization too far by going to the most minute detail, even though there are obvious benefits. I agree with this thought myself, not necessary in terms of libraries but in life. Sometimes we complicate things by over analyzing them and it was reassuring to know my thoughts were shared a continent apart.