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ALUMNI NEWS
Matthew Yeo (2001, History) on publishing his latest book about Chetham’s Library
Matthew Yeo has recently published his first
book, The Acquisition of Books by Chetham’s
Library, 1655-1700, a detailed study of the
way in which the early modern provincial
library was created, stocked and administered.
The result is a refreshing reinterpretation of
provincial intellectual culture, and of the early
modern trade in books and ideas.
‘It is true that a fair Librarie, is not onely an
ornament and credit to the place where it
is; but a useful commoditie by itself to the
publick; yet in effect it is no more than a Dead
Bodie as now it is constituted, in comparison
of what it might bee, if it were animated
with a publick Spirit to keep and use it, and
ordered as it might bee for publick Service’. 1
Chetham’s Library was founded at a time
when libraries were at the forefront of many
scholars’ minds. Although the connection is
coincidental, this quotation from the Reformed
Librarie-Keeper by John Durie is all the more
pertinent to the study of Chetham’s Library
because it was published by Robert Littlebury,
the publisher and bookseller who supplied
books to the Library between 1655 and the
1. John Durie, The Reformed-School And the Reformed
Librarie-Keeper (London: Robert Littlebury, 1651).
Image courtesy of the Librarian and Feoffees of Chetham’s
Library
end of the seventeenth century. Books had
to be arranged on the shelves in order to
facilitate an easy transition from one book to
another. Durie captured the importance of the
usefulness of books to early modern readers.
Libraries were not just beautiful additions to
houses or communities, but had to provide a
service. Durie’s work lamented the reduction
of librarianship to mere conservation, and
he looked back to an earlier age of activist
Protestant librarianship, in which the library
was a knowledge factory.
At Chetham’s Library in the seventeenth
century, many books were read selectively.
These works, such as biblical concordances and
harmonies, formed a large part of the Library’s
earliest purchases, intended to combat the
‘information overload’ generated by the fruits
of the printing press. The scholarly value of
these books came not from the persuasiveness
of their arguments. Instead, it was derived
from the capaciousness of the indexes and
from readers’ strategies to wade through the
huge number of texts to be read. These were
books that indicated that the reader was an
active and creative participant in the creation
of meaning from the text. Early modern
readers acknowledged the fact that books
were for use, and increasingly, historians of
the early modern period recognise it too.
Readers in libraries acknowledge that libraries
have to be organised to make them useful
rather than just repositories of books.
They provide ‘standards of coherence’ by
which readers understand the texts they
read, which include catalogues, shelving
and practices of storage and retrieval. The
‘intelligencer’ Samuel Hartlib made efforts in
the seventeenth century to create coherent
bodies of knowledge, and corresponded
with John Worthington, a regular visitor to
Chetham’s Library, to discuss how to perfect
catalogues and indexes for books in libraries.
For Hartlib, a librarian, and particularly one
responsible for a scientific library, had to
become ‘a factor and trader for helpes to
learning, a treasurer to keep them and a
dispenser to apply them to use, or see them
well used, or at least not abused’.
Libraries and librarians were important
elements in the early modern trade in books
and ideas. However, there is a real danger
in the inference that libraries simply store
the products of the book trade. The study of
early modern libraries must work outwards
from a Library’s acquisition and ownership of
a book, through a multitude of issues around
intellectual content, material forms and the
book trade, to the reading and employment
of texts in the early modern period. n
ST CATHERINE’S COLLEGE 2012/43