A Companion to the History of the Book (94 page)

Most importantly, authors’ societies everywhere, but particularly in the United Kingdom, campaigned for a new financial relationship between themselves and the publishers, built around a system of royalty payment rather than the sale of copyrights or half-profits agreements. The basic principle of royalties is very simple: the author takes a percentage of the revenue from every copy sold of his or her book. Thus, the author of a successful book shares with the publisher the long-term profits of his or her work. Royalty agreements gradually became the norm; by the middle of the twentieth century, authors expected at least 10 percent for most general trade books.

For almost two hundred years, authors have been in the forefront of campaigns for better and more effective copyright law, and have sought to exploit it for their own ends. This has had formal legislative consequences, both nationally and internationally, but it has also led to a fundamental change in the business relationships between authors and publishers. Nineteenth-century legislation in most countries effectively provided authors with a legal framework within which their books could generate an income for their lifetimes and to some extent for their heirs. But the framework was no more than that. In practice, the law itself is perhaps less important than the way in which the framework is used. Without a law of copyright it is unlikely that authors could have won financial recognition of their contribution to the publishing industry and the book trade. Within such a law, literary property – the strange entity created from the brain of a man or woman sitting in front of a white piece of paper (or a blank screen) – takes on the reality of a physical entity and a marketable commodity.

Contemporary copyright has become immensely complex. The multiplication of formats and media since the second half of the nineteenth century has created new markets for intellectual products. Subsidiary rights can be created in any or all of these media and forms of output, rights that can have specifically territorial applications – another source of tension between the British and American book trades through the middle decades of the twentieth century.

The most recent technological developments are beginning to raise fundamental issues about the long-term enforceability of copyright laws. Photocopying, which has been widespread since the late 1960s, opened the floodgates, and electronic document delivery may well have created the flood. Photocopying was dealt with under “fair-dealing rules” that allowed a limited amount of copying without charge for private purposes. Beginning as an informal arrangement between publishers and librarians, fair dealing was incorporated into American law in 1976 and British law in 1988. Enforcement has proved difficult, but the Publishers’ Association in the UK and the Association of American Publishers in the US have mounted effective campaigns against infringement, as they have against the illegal reprinting of copyright works in certain countries in Asia. The development of the Internet, however, creates an altogether more formidable problem. Even basic issues such as payment regimes for electronic journals remain partly unresolved. The protection of copyright works that are in the public sphere in a digital format presents formidable technical, legal, and practical difficulties. Some contemporary commentators incline to the view that the long history of copyright may be coming to an end. That will be a question for the twenty-first century.

References and Further Reading

Armstrong, Elizabeth (1990)
Before Copyright: The French Book-privilege System 1498–1526.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Astbury, Raymond (1978) “The Renewal of the Licensing Act in 1693, and its Lapse in 1695,”
Library,
5th series, 33 (4): 291–322.

Bonham Carter, Victor (1978–84)
Authors by Profession, 2
vols. London: Society of Authors/Bodley Head.

Clegg, Cyndia Susan (1997)
Press Censorship in Elizabethan England.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, A. S. (1927)
Authorship in the Days of Johnson.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Crist, Timothy (1979) “Government Control of the Press after the Expiration of the Printing Act in 1679,”
Publishing History,
5: 49–77.

Deazley, Ronan (2004)
On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-century Britain (1695–1775).
Oxford: Hart.

Feather, John (1980) “The Book Trade in Politics: The Making of the Copyright Act of 1710,”
Publishing History,
8: 19–44.

— (1994a) “From Rights in Copies to Copyright: The Recognition of Author’s Rights in English Law and Practice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (eds.),
The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature,
pp. 191–209. Durham: Duke University Press.

— (1994b)
Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain.
London: Mansell.

— (2005)
A History of British Publishing,
rev. edn. London: Routledge.

Foxon, David (1991)
Pope and the Early Eighteenth-century Book Trade,
rev. edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gerulaitis, L. V. (1976)
Printing and Publishing in Fifteenth-century Venice.
London: Mansell.

Hepburn, James (1968)
The Author’s Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent.
London: Oxford University Press.

Nichol, D. W. (1990) “On the Use of ‘Copy’ and ‘Copyright’: A Scriblerian Coinage?”
Library,
6th series, 12: 110–20.

Patterson, L. Ray (1968)
Copyright in Historical Perspective.
Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Rose, Mark (1993)
Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Woudhuysen, H. R. (1996)
Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

39

Libraries and the Invention of Information

Wayne A. Wiegand

Throughout recorded history, libraries have partnered with books, and since the invention of movable type, libraries have played major roles in an evolving culture of print. Many scholars argue that for the past five thousand years libraries have been essential to the advancement of civilizations. To document their heritage, these civilizations depended upon information contained in texts. Libraries have been responsible not only for preserving these texts, but also for making them accessible by superimposing upon them systems of organization. But the texts libraries have chosen to preserve, and the methods of organization they have developed, also manifest culturally and chronologically distinctive patterns that reflect not only the role of power in the construction of heritage, but also the very definition of the word “information.” While book history clearly demonstrates that the “information age” started when humans began creating texts, librarianship generally defines the “information age” as a modern phenomenon that began in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This chapter seeks to explain why.

Libraries have always been collections of texts (no matter the format), organized to facilitate access (sometimes for their administrators, more often in recent times for the libraries’ publics) and maintained for the use of individuals. Because they are largely voluntary institutions (people do not have to use them), the services and collections they provide (especially in recent centuries) have been regularly influenced and modified by the public they have sought to serve. Generally, libraries have consisted of easily transported yet durable objects that have taken many forms (most often books and periodicals, but in earlier years bones, clay tablets, papyrus roles, and animal skins, and in later years magnetic tape, computer disks, and machine-readable databases) on which literate people have recorded information. Once humans developed standardized sets of signs and symbols into a written language in Mesopotamia and Egypt sometime before 3000 bc, libraries emerged.

Early library collections (often indistinguishable from what today we call “archives”) consisted of a few clay tablets and papyrus rolls made accessible to the tiny literate of the population. They were created to record the accomplishments and the transactions of the politically and economically powerful. Because ancient civilizations made little distinction between church and state (rulers were often considered to be gods), many early libraries were located in temples where scribes recorded information that the governing class considered important, and preserved, classified, and arranged it for future reference.

In the middle of the third millennium bc, a library at Ebla (located in what is now northwestern Syria) contained more than 15,000 clay tablets consisting of government documents, gazetteers, and linguistic and religious reference works. In the seventh century bc, Assyrian king Ashurbanipal ordered scribes to gather tablets from private houses and temples for a palace collection that he put together in Nineveh. Its holdings – accessible only to the king and his scribes – reflected his interests, and included syllabaries, horoscopes, incantations, proverbs, poetry, and omen texts, all inscribed on clay or wooden tablets, organized by physical format, and housed in labeled containers.

The Alexandrian Library, founded by Ptolemy I Soter about 300 bc, had three aims: (1) to collect every work written in Greek as well as sacred texts of contiguous civilizations; (2) to edit and authenticate Greek poets and dramatists; and (3) to create a research library for scholars to study all these materials. Famous scholars were hired as directors, among them Callimachus (d. 240
BC
): he compiled the library’s catalogue called the
Pinakes,
a classified shelf list of ten main classes (for example, drama, laws, history) that referenced labels attached to the ends of the papyrus rolls. Within each class, texts were first arranged alphabetically by main author, after which followed titles of his works. Estimates of the library’s collection range from 40,000 to 700,000 scrolls. Destroyed in the seventh century, the Alexandrian Library nonetheless left an enduring legacy. It became the prototype of the modern national library, demonstrated that a well-organized collection was essential to scholarly study, and created precedents for bibliographical control of large collections of texts, no matter their format.

During the early centuries of the first millennium, the format of the library’s standard information container changed, in part because Christianity, which was emerging as a powerful force, based itself on the examination, comparison, and discussion of the Bible. That text was made much more easily accessible when written on parchment sheets, folded and joined together along one edge. The resulting “codex” also offered ample opportunities for adornment and decoration, thus elevating the work’s value (actual and perceived) to the status of “treasure.” For the next ten centuries in the Western world, the Roman Church gave libraries responsibility for collecting and preserving these treasures; access to them was reserved for individuals who could be trusted to understand that the information contained therein was a part of God’s grand plan. Not coincidentally, the librarians who managed them were most often church officials.

In Asia, the rise of Jainism and Buddhism around the sixth century bc led to the evolution of a canon of religious writings that libraries were established to collect, preserve, and replicate. Emperors in the Han dynasty (206 bc – ad 220) supported efforts to compile and collect Confucian writings and other texts, which were greatly expanded after the invention of paper and the use of block printing made it possible to accelerate rapidly the production of books. Followers of Confucius and Buddha carried their texts to other parts of Asia, where libraries were quickly established to collect and house them for access by people who could mine these information resources for explanations of contemporary phenomena. Three types of libraries developed during India’s ancient period (3000 bc – ad 1206): some were attached to palaces and courts, others to centers of learning, still others to places of worship.

What people did to preserve and organize book collections in Latin Christendom’s Middle Ages (c. 450–1450) laid the foundation for the concept and organization of contemporary libraries. Monastic libraries, advocated by Western European missionary monks and encouraged by the Benedictine Order, set up often elaborate textual copying systems, and thus preserved many of the classical manuscripts and Church writings for later generations. Nonetheless, few of these libraries contained more than several hundred volumes. In population centers, cathedral libraries developed to support newly emerging schools serving local clergy and civil servants. Universities were established in the twelfth century: because these institutions were less religious and more secular than monastic libraries, the scholarship they fostered encouraged exposure to other cultures. As Western European universities evolved, the libraries connected to them assumed larger responsibilities for collecting, preserving, and organizing information. By the sixteenth century, newer university libraries had impressive models to follow at Padua, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge. At each, a central library grew, albeit largely by donation.

For fresh perspectives, some scholars working in these emerging university environments looked to Muslim cultures, which, beginning in the seventh century, reversed the agenda of the extinct Alexandrian Library by translating Greek and Latin manuscripts into Arabic. They also opened large libraries to members of the elite classes in population centers such as Baghdad and Cairo. In tenth-century Cordoba (Spain), Caliph al-Hakim II constructed in a mosque an impressive library of 400,000 volumes which required a forty-four volume catalogue just to list them all. Scholars from the East and the more secular West frequented the library, where for the first time the latter were introduced to a new carrier of information – paper – which Muslims had brought with them from China centuries earlier.

When Johann Gutenberg developed movable type in Mainz in the middle of the fifteenth century, he set in motion forces that had a profound and irreversible impact on libraries. Within half a century, printing presses spread throughout Europe and expanded book production from hundreds to hundreds of thousands per year. This increase accelerated at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Reformation leaders used mass-produced pamphlets and books to promote religious education and Bible reading not only as a public good, but also as an effective check to what they perceived as control of the masses by the Catholic Church. Many Protestant zealots showed their contempt for this control by sacking monastery libraries. In turn, the Roman Church created an
Index librorum prohibitorum
to exercise more influence over lay Catholic reading.

For a while, elite collectors continued to favor the manuscript form of the book, in part to distinguish themselves from newer collectors whose capacity to acquire was made possible by the press’s ability to reproduce text at less cost. Eventually, elite collectors shifted their habits to printed texts as the expanding audience for all printed materials began to fractionalize. The wealthy collected unique and often sumptuously bound texts of literary works considered worthy of preservation. The emerging middle classes, prospering through commerce and manufacturing, collected informational texts that helped them advance and documented their social, economic, and cultural achievements. The poor passed amongst themselves cheaply printed materials (at least some of them could read) that captured the folklore they had previously communicated orally. All used these information resources to help make sense of the world around them.

Because libraries identified with power, the information resources of the most powerful consistently found their way onto library shelves, middle-class texts increasingly so (especially after civic institutions emerged to educate and inform the bourgeoisie), and lower-class texts hardly at all. Library collections, services, and access were marked by gender as well as class, since they existed in a milieu of information creation, production, and dissemination that was deliberately designed to bolster existing patriarchies. Some libraries existed on the margins of these power structures, however. People connected to minority creeds, or people secretly collecting materials considered offensive to elite cultural norms, often developed their own libraries (personal and institutional) of information resources. As long as they remained hidden away, or as long as those libraries were not perceived by those in power to be threats to their social order, they were generally safe from harm. In addition, wives and daughters of “gentlemen” who boasted impressive private libraries (acquired in part to demonstrate their wealth) frequently had access to these books, which they often read differently from the way in which their mostly male authors and owners intended. Increasingly, libraries began to function as places where multiple interpretations and appropriations of texts were made possible, since no external authority could mandate a uniform interpretation of any text read in solitude.

Just as religious groups sought to propagandize readers through the distribution of texts (many of which found their way into libraries supported by those same groups), so those in political power realized that texts could create a new sense of community by persuading people they were part of a unique “nation.” To make manifest the uniqueness of nations, each eventually combined what previously had been the libraries of local social, political, and economic elites with the collections of royalty to create a government-supported national library whose primary responsibility was to identify, collect, record, and organize the information resources that documented the nation’s cultural heritage, however narrowly that heritage was defined. So began national libraries in Prussia (later Germany), France, Austria, Spain, Great Britain, and Sweden in the eighteenth century, the US Library of Congress in the nineteenth century, and the Russian State Library and the National Library of China in the twentieth century.

Nations also recognized that they could expand their power by confronting other nations of equal or lesser strength. Colonialism represented a joint effort by national political and religious elites to spread their influence and exploit resources and people beyond their home territories. Portugal, Spain, France, and Great Britain (among others) conquered millions of people on the continents of Africa, Australia, South America, and North America (and thousands of islands in between). Many of those people (especially Africans) were forcibly relocated and/or enslaved. Always the colonizers took with them the cultural institutions they had developed over the centuries, including libraries. Jesuit missionaries who accompanied military forces sent out by national governments quickly established schools and libraries in Asia and South America to hasten the process of converting the indigenous peoples they subjugated. In the colonies of North America, the established Anglican Church of Great Britain worked through the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts to establish several kinds of libraries for the use of clergy and laity, some to help steel the faithful against temptation, others to help convert Native Americans.

In the seventeenth century, a new order we now call “modernity” emerged that separated people’s daily life experiences into work and leisure. Over time, those who established and ran libraries came to regard as most important the kinds of information that addressed questions related to work, or helped readers become intelligent consumers, educated people, and better-behaved citizens. In their collecting practices, librarians clearly favored the kinds of information they and others labeled “useful knowledge.”

As the Enlightenment secularized Western societies and cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it led to the emergence of new institutions that gradually evolved a “public sphere” designed to voice a “public interest” that neither governments nor marketplaces could safely ignore. Because institutions created by this movement (for example, newspapers, periodicals, political parties, and professions) insisted on participating in public life, they effectively forced the expansion of access to existing libraries for larger numbers of the citizenry, and even created several new types of libraries. Besides national libraries, private libraries, and university libraries, many individuals began to pool resources to create social libraries. Membership was restricted to those who paid dues, and those invited to membership generally had to meet certain qualifications. As a result, social libraries were run by a fairly homogeneous socioeco-nomic group with a clear idea of what constituted “useful knowledge.” The first order of books that Benjamin Franklin sent to London in 1731 to begin the Library Company of Philadelphia contained no novels, but instead concentrated on dictionaries, grammars, atlases, histories, and works on science and agriculture “suited to the tastes and purposes of young tradesmen.” Some social libraries evolved into athenaeums (socially exclusive reading institutions); others eventually made the transition to public libraries.