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Treasures of the Great Bodleian Library

A patch of vibrant wilderness

Treasures of the Great Bodleian Library

View of the interior of the Bodleian Picture Gallery by Wessel. 1829



BN Goswamy

Without memories, and the chance to dwell on them and sift them affectionately but sensibly, we lose our true sense of ourselves, and we go collectively insane. That is the chief justification for libraries and archives, and that is why it is such a good work to cherish them and build them up. And here we are honouring a palace among libraries, where the custodians and their generous donors have chosen to share Bodley’s memories…

— Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch of Oxford at the opening of an exhibition at the Bodleian Library

When, at our recent meeting in India, Lady Helen Hamlyn handed me as a gift a precious tome, I somehow thought it might be on the Masterpieces Gallery which she had designed and gifted to the Bodleian Library in Oxford: something I had heard rave reviews of from friends. But it was not that: it turned out to be a different book, although still related to the Bodleian, and still holding the exciting promise of an attentive ‘read’. Marks of Genius it was titled, put together by Stephen Hebron of the Library, and sponsored by Toby Blackwell whose family founded the famous Blackwell’s, ‘one of the greatest bookshops of the world’, that ‘remarkable shop kept by a remarkable man’, a neighbour to the great Library with which it has had an ‘osmotic relationship’. The focus of this book? Genius, of course, that ‘mysterious pinnacle of human creativity’, ‘a gift that cannot be acquired through dedication and hard work’, ‘difficult to define, but also difficult to ignore’.

It must have been a hard book to put together, even as it threw out hard questions about the nature of genius, since even to make a selection of works to write on from the vast resources of the Library must have been so demanding. For the Library holds unbelievable riches: not only some 12 million printed items, and over 80,000 e-journals, but also outstanding special collections of rare books and manuscripts, classical papyri, maps, music, and art. It all started some four hundred years ago when Sir Thomas Bodley gave a generous gift to the University of Oxford, in the hope of reviving an older library that had nearly gone to all but ruin in the middle of the 16th century. A product of the Oxford University himself, Sir Thomas had done remarkably well in his career – both as a trader and as a diplomat – and wanted to do something for his alma mater now, having seen the old library ‘laid waste”. In 1598, he wrote — in the quaint old language (and spellings) of the times – with his offer of support thus to the Vice-Chancellor of the University:  “Where there hath bin heretofore a publike library in Oxford, which, you know, is apparent by the rome it self remaining, and by your statute Records, I will take the charge and cost upon me, to reduce it again to his former use: and to make it fitte, and handsome with seates, and shelfes, and deskes, and all that may be needful, to stirre up other mens benevolence, to helpe furnish it with bookes.” It was a historic moment, for the ‘benefit of posteritie’ that Sir Thomas spoke of was a real concern, and his interest in the Library never flagged. The Library got off the ground in 1602. Slowly that ‘other mens benevolence’, which he had hoped his gift would stir, did gather steam. The rest, of course, is the stuff that history is made of. The riches that have poured in ever since – donations in cash and kind, whole collections of books and manuscripts, original works, first editions, correspondences, personal papers, works of art, and all – have been beyond belief. The creative brilliance of Shakespeare and Mendelssohn is here, so are the scientific innovations of Robert Hooke and Dorothy Hodgkin. ‘Four hundred years on,’ the introduction says, ‘the Bodleian Library is an institution through which traces of genius run like a golden thread.’ The great Magna Carta is deposited here as is the Gutenberg Bible; there are works in the hand of Euclid and Dante, Kafka and Handel, Einstein, Austen and Gandhi, as a random sample. Everywhere here, there are testimonies to greatness.

The book that I am speaking of here aims at drawing attention to these riches and, never losing sight of the theme of ‘genius’, it showcases 130 of ‘the greatest treasures’ in the Bodleian Libraries — the original Library having expanded now and, banyan-like, thrown other roots — drawn from across different centuries and different cultures. To say it again, in these pages if there is a 1522 volume of St. Augustine’s City of God, there is also the autograph version of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism; a hand-coloured copy of Audubon’s Birds of America nestles next to a 1550 manuscript of a Safavid Quran; Gandhiji’s letter to C.F. Andrew is there as much as Dorothy Hodgkin’s hand-drawn insulin map; Chaucer’s work stands next to Shakespeare’s first edition; a Shah Jahan period Mughal album and Jane Austen’s manuscript set up a dialogue among themselves, as it were. One can go on and on with this.

Again and again, one returns to the theme of genius in these pages and in all the discussions of what it is, or is made of, what shines through is the humanity with which the world of scholarship and learning is limned. At least as far as I am concerned. I am tempted therefore to end this piece by quoting from the opening paragraph of Stephen Hebron’s thoughtful essay on The Character of Genius. “In the final episode of his television series Civilisation: A Personal View, Kenneth Clark gave a summary of his beliefs. ‘Order is better than chaos’, he said, ‘creation better than destruction’. He preferred gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta; human sympathy and courtesy were more valuable than ideology. ‘Above all’, he concluded, ‘I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.’”

Post-script

Against this background and in this context, I feel myself entitled to wonder — wonder clearly tinged with envy on the one hand and disenchantment on the other — where we in India stand, and where our repositories of learning are.

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