Earlier
this month most of us read or heard about the attempt to destroy medieval
manuscripts held in trust for humanity by the citizens and librarians of
Timbuktu. Extremists, intent on
eradicating the cultural heritage and communal history of those who
participated in the golden age of Arabic and Medieval learning, attempted to
burn or otherwise destroy the treasures of that intellectual era.
Fortunately,
librarians, family guardians of personal collections, archivists in many of the
mosques of Timbuktu, the Library of Congress’ digitization program, heroic
citizens of Mali, and French warriors anticipated the vindictive fury and single
mindedness of these mindless modern day barbarians. Many thousands of pieces were smuggled out of
the city on donkey carts. A few were
destroyed.
These
treasures are irreplaceable and fortunately only a small proportion was
physically destroyed. Many pieces had been digitized by forward thinking librarians;
others held their preservation as a sacred duty passed through hundreds of
generations by families who own private collections. The manuscripts were protected as the
privilege of family honor. One for our
side!
Victories
have been few and far between as preservation of a people’s intellectual often
meets a very different fate. The physicality
of books, manuscripts, and codex implies their fragility. Electronic media have
uncertain permanence. I can recommend
the book The Universal History of the
Destruction of Books by Fernando Baez and Alfred MacAdam to get a sense of
a sometimes losing battle.
The biggest
danger by far is man, especially the fanatics. Conquerors knew that the
subjugation of a people required the destruction of the best their civilization
has produced—ideas and narrative. Libraries
and archives are almost always targets of incoming barbarians who are intent on
seeding the intellectual landscape of conquered peoples with salt. Small victories do happen though. Read the fictional account of a rare
illustrated Hebrew work in Geraldine Brooks’ excellent People of the Book.
Miracles
sometimes occur. The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel tells of the miraculous recovery of an unknown
work of the Greek mathematician.
Although the scroll had been co-opted for a mediocre prayer book, modern
technology was able to recover the greatness written on the palimpsest. Many
other masterpieces of Western Intellectual Heritage were not so fortunate. How
many other libraries have been destroyed some in the name of religion, a few by
librarians themselves? How few have been
saved?
Too few
have been saved despite the aegis of dedicated librarians. Four of the chief
tenets of librarianship are the Collection, Preservation, Organization and
Dissemination of human knowledge in any form—paper or other media. It is that secular sacred duty, the
preservation of the seeds of knowledge that made the choice of profession for
me. If I could pass that information and
means to knowledge on to others, if I could in some way preserve and protect a
small portion of that heritage, then that was work worth doing. Fiction and phone numbers aside, this was to
be my real work. Every day I learned from information seekers, humbled by the
vast expanse of my ignorance. What an immense intellectual world existed beyond
my ken! Every day I tried to become
better, to learn more, to find the seeds of knowledge and to plant them in
fertile minds. In a career now over I
hope that I helped a few. I know I fell far short, but that does not mean that
the ideal does not persist. The preservation
of Timbuktu’s heritage sustains me; the heroes who risked their lives imbue me
with hope. They are my ideal and ideals
are treasure beyond price.
