Printing and its Effects on Libraries

Brianne's reflection in her post for the annotated bibliography assignment got me thinking about libraries. Remember way back when we discussed libraries as an institution of knowledge? We discussed the library as a institution of knowledge for a written medium. However, I'm sitting in a library right now, and there aren't too many hand-written manuscripts I can handle. It's mostly printed books. I am therefore going to take a look at libraries in terms of print knowledge.

Libraries (by which I mean the print-based libraries we're used to) are incredibly useful. When in doubt, we go to the library. When looking for information on printing and various topics related to it, we search in a library. When we need to kill a basilisk, we wander to the library, mirror in hand. When hunting Voldemort's horcruxes, we travel in a mobile library. You get the point.


When we thing of the "great libraries of history," we probably think of Alexandria or imperial Chinese libraries. However, we have similar "great libraries" today, such as the Library of Congress. Even most small towns in the U.S. have little libraries, and every university has a rather large one. Still, there are some big differences between modern print libraries and ancient written-text libraries.

Do you think if you lived in Alexandria in 200 BC that you could just walk into a library and check out a scroll? NO! These things were so valuable that the government took any manuscripts they thought they could use and confiscated them from travelers. That scroll you want to borrow is probably more valuable than your house and all your other possessions if you're a commoner. There is no way that you can "check out" that text. (Not to mention, you probably couldn't read anyways...)

Prior to the printing press, only the wealthiest European literati could have libraries; the two largest libraries in Italy were (I would assume, but I have no definite information) in the Vatican, where the Pope's collection would be, and in Florence, where the Medici family ruled as artistic and literary patrons. During the Renaissance, you still couldn't walk into these libraries to look at something if you were a common Italian.

With the rise of printing, however, books became cheaper. They also became more readily available. Despite this, it wasn't really until the Enlightenment that we got libraries that the public could use. Even then, these were almost exclusively in large cities such as Paris and London. Universities began to add printed books to their collections, too, and eventually these would become open to the public.

Many European monarchs of the time called "Enlightened Despots," such as Louis XIV and Napoleon in France, Catherine the Great in Russia, Frederick the Great in Prussia, and Maria Theresa in Austria, tried to open more texts up to the public, which was also now more literate. They used printed books to create state-run libraries and used wealthy patrons desiring to have their fame in the city or relationship with the government to fund them. We thus have the beginnings of the public library!

Thus, as printed texts were cheaper, more mass-produced, and more easily obtained than handwritten texts, the library subsequently changed with the medium it held. As books became more available to the public because of these changes related to a print medium, governments began to create libraries that were open to the public, the first "modern" libraries like those we have today. Thus the development of print led to the creation of the modern library which we use today!