Plaster Books in a Concrete Prison
"Anyone looks like a scholar in such an environment. The guide called the background 'dark academia.'"
Jonas Rosenthal is a 22-year-old Fulbright Scholar studying the development of mathematics in pre-modern North Africa.
The library of Trinity College Dublin had no books. The books had been removed, a helpful audio guide accessible via QR code explained to me during my September visit, due to ongoing restoration work. Not to fear, however. In place of the books, plaster casts of the relevant size and shape have been placed along the magnificent eighteenth century shelves, some helpfully marked via large plastic arrows as books of interest — a first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, say, or a partial First Folio.
I wondered, briefly, how the Trinity College librarians had come to the decision as to which “books” to highlight and which to leave anonymous, their titles having sadly melted into the plaster. What if I had been interested in the agricultural records of nineteenth century County Meath? Where was the arrow to point me to the Return of Owners of Land, 1873? A tour guide explained that the removed library books were still accessible.
“We didn’t get rid of them or anything,” he said. “They’re stored off-site. Scholars can request them online.”
I did not learn what in the library was being restored. There was no scaffolding or sawdust anywhere. In fact, the library seemed quite comfortable with its book-free existence. To me, at least, there was no urgency to the restorations, which I gathered had already taken three years, with the prospect of more time still. There was urgency, however, to the installation of new busts in the library. The previous set of busts, which included such famous Irish magnates as Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Milton, had not included any women. This had been remedied recently with four new busts, of whom only one — the dramatist Augusta Gregory — was Irish.
Given the crowds of tourists who paid good money and waited for an hour to take pictures in the famous hall, plaster books and all, perhaps the Trinity College library was not really suited anymore to people who are interested in actually reading books. Perhaps — difficult as it might be to imagine this at a library proud to have been, only a month before my visit, ranked first out of a thousand libraries for tourism — the scholars might have gotten in the way of the more important business at hand. At twenty euro a ticket, and twenty million euro a year, the library was a business.1
As I finished my tour of the library, I discovered that the audio guide was wrong. One book remains at Trinity College: the Book of Kells, a ninth century illuminated Evangelion. Housed in a hall underneath the main library that is not dissimilar in form to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, the Book of Kells is, if you pass through an extensive exhibit designed to convince you of the book’s importance, duly splayed underneath smoked glass. It is not available for check-out.
If you crave more Book of Kells, after you leave the Trinity College library you can walk one hundred and fifty meters to the “Book of Kells Experience.” It is only there that the fact is revealed — with an uncomfortable undertone and an implicit, embarrassed cough — that the Book of Kells is no more Irish than the Rosetta Stone is British, having been carted off to Ireland from Scotland by raiders sometime in the tenth century.
The difference with the Shrine of the Book is twofold. To begin with, Israel has the self-awareness to call it a “shrine,” instead of a “library.” The second is that Israel uses the shrine to make a deathly serious argument: that those tattered scraps of parchment written by Jewish heretics more than two thousand years ago in the Judean desert give the State of Israel a moral, religious, ideological, and political claim and right to the land and its inhabitants. Israel makes that argument with guns, too.
Perhaps Trinity College is attempting something similar, a last riposte to West Englanders and Anglo-Irish loyalists, but if so, they are incompetent at it. They fail to make clear their message and dilute its import by charging admission. What they ought to do instead, if they are serious, is to make admission free, require every visiting foreign leader to make a stop there, and put a big banner over the Book of Kells reading “TWELVE HUNDRED YEARS OF CELTIC HERITAGE WILL NEVER SURRENDER” or “DEATH TO INVADERS — UNITED IRELAND NOW” or another appropriately belligerent slogan.
Instead, they charge their twenty euro and hurry tourists along to take pictures in their lovely library — the inspiration for two different science fiction libraries on screen, I heard in my guide (the Jedi Library on Coruscant in Star Wars and the Imperial Library on Trantor in Foundation). The reverent busts, vaulted ceiling, gold-leaf shelf marks, and perfectly-in-place plaster books are a fantastic background for photographs, especially if the photos are appropriately framed and composed so that the books appear to be real. Anyone looks like a scholar in such an environment. The guide called the background “dark academia.”
The secondary branch of the British Library, the British Library Document Supply Service (BLDSS), is located next to a prison. The BLDSS houses half of the British Library’s two hundred million or so items, including most of its periodicals. It is housed in a converted World War II arms factory outside of the town of Boston Spa, and it is bordered to its south by HM Prison Wealstun, a Category C men’s prison housing about eight hundred moderately dangerous criminals who are, for the most part, locked in their cells twenty-three hours a day and subject to excessive force, according to the most recent Chief Inspector of Prisons report.2
A few days after touring the Trinity College library, I flew to Edinburgh, took a train to Leeds, boarded a steadily emptying bus to Boston Spa, and finally walked three miles along pleasant country lanes. The prison had rust-stained cement-and-barbed-wire walls. After the prison, the sidewalks ended, and I walked on the curb, or along fields empty of cows. It drizzled a bit as I walked, but not enough to bother me. The guard at the public entrance of the BLDSS seemed surprised when I walked up to his hut, which sat between two gates, one for cars driving in and one for cars driving out. There was also barbed wire around the BLDSS, although, unlike the prison, there was no cement.
“Why are you here?”
He was not asking me what I was going to see, or what research I was doing, or even if I had any business going to the British Library. He was asking why I had walked. There was no pedestrian entrance, so after radioing his superiors, he opened the electronic car gate for me. Perhaps it was the English countryside that put me in the mood, but I felt a bit like a hobbit stealing through the great Doors of Durin.
Once inside, I was told to follow a painted yellow line on the road that would lead me to the reading room. The interior of the vast archival compound is no different than the exterior in that it was clearly designed for a wheeled and motorized researcher. It is half a mile from the gate to the reading room, mainly through a car park.
To enter the reading room, I had to get a Reader’s Card. My reader’s card from the main British Library branch, in St. Pancras, had expired. This provoked some displeasure from the staff. Only one person on the staff, it seemed, could award me a Reader’s Card. He had to be fetched.
“Finnicky system,” he said, poking at a large computer with two screens. “Let me see. Do you see anything on your screen? No? What about…” and then, with great strain, he got the program running. As I filled in my personal details, he explained the basics. “You’ll have to give us about two days to get anything from the collection here.”
Two days seemed an impressive turnaround to get any item out of ninety million, and I said so.
“We try our best.”
But there was no wandering around the stacks or archives — “all very sensitive, delicate, you understand.” Materials located at the St. Pancras branch, as I suspected, were not available for study up here in Boston Spa. However, the reverse was not true. “We can send materials down to St. Pancras, also within two days.”
Both within two days! It takes precisely the same amount of time to move a copy of, say, the December 12, 1975 edition of Private Eye in which Auberon Waugh first alluded to the Jeremy Thorpe affair — my imagination was inspired by the nearby town of Thorp Arch — one hundred and sixty-five miles south to St. Pancras as it does to move it half a mile from one of the grey former arms warehouses to the reading room. This equanimity both delighted and saddened me. It seemed a miracle of organizational efficiency and also a tremendous waste. What was the point of the reading room here in the Document Supply Service?
The Document Supply Service, I read in a little exhibition and timeline sandwiched between the canteen and the bathrooms, was built in the post-war spirit of national consensus. The munitions factory had been built here during the war, as it was too far from any urban areas to be a target for German bombers but was also reasonably close to transit and logistics networks. Raw materials and workers could be shipped in quickly, while munitions could be shipped out equally quickly, without putting civilians at risk. After the war, the location was equally safe from Soviet nuclear weapons as it had been from the Luftwaffe, thus making it an ideal place to safely store lots of books while still distributing them around the country. Rural isolation combined with transportation links is a winning idea for keeping things safe and out of sight.
That’s why there’s also a prison there.
The main branch of the British Library lacks a catalogue. At one point the British Library had a complete catalogue of all the two hundred million items it houses, but two years ago Russian state-sponsored cybercriminals hacked the British Library’s network and held it for ransom. A librarian at Boston Spa explained that the highest levels of Rishi Sunak’s government, in consultation with MI5, declined to pay the ransom. One cannot negotiate with terrorists. The terrorists did not back down, and the British Library shut down. Overnight they lost their entire catalogue, their email services, their memberships records, and their scanning capabilities.
When I last visited their St. Pancras location, several months after the hack, the librarians told me that they could not find the manuscript I had requested. They knew they had it — it was listed in one of the older, printed catalogues they had kept, and it was listed there more out of a librarian’s usual reluctance to prune than out of a belief that the manuscript might come in use again — but it could be anywhere in their stacks. The stacks at St. Pancras go so far down that the trains running out of Kings Cross go through them, rather than below them. So there is a moment, riding the Northern Line, when you are surrounded by books — books above you, below you, to your left and to your right — and yet, because of the ad-lined tube walls, you cannot see a single book.
Some of the British Library’s manuscripts had been scanned, digitized, and transcribed already, but not the one I was interested in. Several years earlier, the Qatari National Library had scanned what they considered the best Arabic manuscripts in the British Library, but their criteria for “best” had, remarkably, prioritized manuscripts from the general vicinity of modern Qatar. The manuscript I was after was from Morocco.
I was relieved to find St. Pancras in better shape on my most recent visit, a week after I visited the BLDSS. The library was crowded with people. They sat at every available workstation — on every chair, stool, or bench — and some even leaned against the wall. Outside of the reading rooms, no one was reading; they all worked on their laptops. St. Pancras has very fast Wi-Fi, which was the first digital service restored after the cyberattack. But certain services — the scanning of manuscripts, for example, or recreating the digital catalogue — are still incomplete. No one knows when they might be restored.
Using an old catalogue in Latin — thankfully, they knew where that was stored — the librarians, in their officially issued uniforms of turtlenecks and tweed, were able to find the manuscript. Unfortunately, they had lost any provenance or archival information regarding it. They had the manuscript, but knew nothing about how they had come to have it, like a hungover bridegroom clutching someone else’s Vegas hotel room keys the morning after a bachelor’s party. One librarian recognized the diamond “MUSEUM BRITANICUM” stamp on the front cover as exclusive to the 1830s. He suggested I read the diaries of the Arabic curator of that period for more information. The diaries had not been digitized either. The librarian was unsure where the physical diaries were located.
“They might be at the Bodleian at Oxford,” he mused. “But you’d have to ask them there. We don’t have the records anymore.”
The Asian and African Manuscript room was, in contrast to the packed halls outside, nearly empty. A middle-aged couple paged through British census records from the Raj, doing genealogical research. A young man took notes — in pencil, of course, for pens are strictly forbidden in the manuscript room — on declassified British diplomatic notes from the Trucial States. I read the four pages of the manuscript that had taken me so long to find. I had a scan of the only other copy in existence, the Algerian National Library’s copy, and so I merely noted where the British Library edition differed.
Before the cyberattack, I had requested — and paid — for a full scan of this little manuscript, which is bound with seven other Arabic manuscripts by different authors. It is the last manuscript of the eight, the last four pages in the codex. The British Library had instead sent me a scan of the first four pages of the codex. They must have been confused about the difference between left-to-right English writing and binding and right-to-left Arabic writing and binding. The British Library was hacked while I was trying to explain over email the rich history of writing in the Middle East. My interlocutor’s email account fell silent, and I never discovered if they had made a clumsy mistake or if the librarian in charge of scanning Arabic manuscripts for one of the world’s largest Arabic manuscript collections did not know that most basic fact about Arabic.
Outside the Asian and African Studies Reading Room a paid tour was proceeding through. The tour guide gestured at the stacks.
“The stacks here at St. Pancras go so far down that the trains running out of Kings Cross go through them, rather than below them….”
In the United States today, there are intense struggles over libraries, especially those in public schools or those in residential neighborhoods. There have always been conflicts over what libraries can and cannot stock, but something about the insecurity of contemporary American politics has heightened them. Certain conservative advocacy groups, I understand, have used large language models to create lists of books — some real, some fictional — that must be banned lest they contaminate the youth. At public meetings of school boards and city councils, these activists harass librarians and threaten elected officials.
There is something almost touchingly naïve about the idea that, in a world where the internet exists and hardcore pornography, snuff films, and hasbara for every conceivable atrocity or ideology are instantly accessible, a book with a chaste kiss between two characters of the same sex, or Kinglsey Amis’s milquetoast speech on the redistribution of buns in Lucky Jim, might be what incites a young mind to reject Truth, Justice, and The American Way. It is easy to imagine that some of the books being thrown out have never even been checked out.
In every challenge or defense of a drag queen story hour is inherent the claim that libraries and books matter. But why do they matter? Why do people queue for hours every day to take pictures in the Trinity College library? Why does the British government pay millions of pounds every year — and millions more in emergency funds when they must contend with something like a cyberattack — to maintain two hundred million items in a prime location in London and a perfectly serviceable site for a new prison in Yorkshire? Why do thousands of students cram the British Library every day, not to read its books but to type on their laptops?
Jessica Pressman, in her book of the same name, develops the concept of “bookishness.” Bookishness is the fetishization of the physical form of the book, especially the leather-bound codex, accompanied usually, but not always, by a lack of interest in the content of such books. It is Jane Austen bedspreads, book-inspired laptop cases, and bookshelves with built-in books as empty as those in the Trinity College library. With bookishness, the power of books transcends the words within them and becomes, instead, the aura of what they represent.
Books can mean different things from what the words within them mean. Few visitors to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem care very much, say, about the subtle differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls’s version of Isaiah and the received version. Probably even fewer visitors to the Trinity College library care about the exact selection of psalms within the Book of Kells. Yet, even or especially without their actual content, those books still represent primeval, powerful, and dangerous emotions: nation and identity; sacrifice and triumph; death and rebirth. Less seriously perhaps, the bookish backdrops of the Trinity College library or the St. Pancras British Library confer a certain status inspired by, but not directly of, the books themselves: intellectualism, sexual maturity, even genius.
Bookishness expands to encompass all places where there are books: libraries, fated to contain many books, must become temples to bookishness. Even as literacy and book-reading decline, their aura increases — faster, in fact, as now there are fewer unfortunate interruptions to the “feel” of the library from the mundane contents of so many books. The photos of the Trinity College library would be much less sexy with a paunchy, middle-aged man in the background trying to find the earliest mention of the steam engine in Irish economic records.
Libraries have always served many different functions, as they spring from many different wells. There are the grand royal libraries of encyclopedic kings who sought to prove their domination not just of land and men but of all knowledge — the library of Ashurbanipal, for example, or the library of the Yongle Emperor. There are the religious or philosophical libraries inspired by a hope, slightly more subtle than that of the monks in Arthur Clark’s The Nine Billion Names of God, to achieve revelation via compilation. There are the philanthropic libraries of tycoons and industrialists that promote self-reliance, thrift, and hard work and thus justify their sponsor’s existence — the Carnegie libraries that dot the United States — and the labor libraries of working men and women that justify just the opposite. There are the national libraries of legal deposit — the British Library and the Trinity College library both enjoy this right — that are entitled to every work published in that country as a matter of law.
In the video game Minecraft, the user’s ability to cast certain spells is dependent on the number of bookshelves in a given radius — what is held within the bookshelves does not matter. In real life, we are not much better than that. Libraries cast an aura of something we are rapidly casting away. We cannibalize the readership of the past to disguise our own lack of interest in reading. Libraries become “community spaces” and “indoctrination centers,” depending on one’s political bias, and somewhere in the screaming matches between retirees who have not read a book since the Ford administration and activists whose attention spans are only slightly shorter than the lifecycle of a mayfly, we lose the idea that books can be something other than a prop for the utterly contemporary demands of politics.
It is easy for people like me — people who own lots of books; whose family and friends own lots of books; who don’t look like a shoplifting risk and can wander around bookstores for hours without buying anything; who have computers and stable internet connections to pirate PDFs of any book they want; who have university degrees from elite institutions that include a lifelong membership to private libraries — to imagine libraries as something other than spaces for reading books. I have many fond memories of going to magic shows and puppet shows growing up and yes, drag queen story hours, at my public library. But I also have many memories of reading books in those libraries: good books and bad books, books I sought out and books I serendipitously found; books I probably should not have read and books I definitely should not have read. What mattered, in the end, was not the aura of the library, not the floorplans that placed which busts where, not the arguments about what the library “represented” or what the library “said about society,” but the mundane books themselves.
In Walter Moers’s novel The City of Dreaming Books, the main character is lost in a vast catacomb stuffed with books. He wanders through the labyrinth, despairing at finding his way out, when he abruptly realizes that books around him are not decor, are not aesthetic, are not mere purveyors of aura, but real books that might help him escape.
It was thoroughly idiotic of me to ignore the books. If I could expect help from any quarter, it was from them…I felt I was sailing across a dark sea in which countless lighthouses stood on little islands. The lighthouses were writers beaming their lonely messages across the centuries — I was sailing from island to island, guided by those literary beacons. They were the thread that would lead me out of the labyrinth. Hunger and thirst forgotten, I snatched book after book off the shelves, deduced my progress from them and hurried on, then paused once more and took out another.
One day, sneaking into the stacks closed to the public because the delicate books are kept prisoner; or because the catalogue was digitized and then lost in a cyberattack; or because the books have been replaced with plaster facsimiles of themselves; or because all of the books have been vetted and rejected by chatbots and lunatics; or because the books are blocked by a community theater production of a timely and contemporary rewriting of Almansor, I hope I might actually be able to read a book in a library again. Useful for escaping a dungeon or useless for anything but wasting an hour of my life, experimental literary fiction or flavor-of-the-month romantasy, Arabic manuscripts or Celtic bibles — their words mean something to me, separate from their spines. I refuse, like Walter Moers’s protagonist, to accept walls of books as props.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20250320014718/https://universitytimes.ie/2024/09/the-impact-of-unrestricted-campus-tourism-on-trinity-students/
https://hmiprisons.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmipris_reports/hmp-wealstun/
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The persistent search for knowledge from the written word will be the savior of humanity.
In my city, public libraries are often used as refuges for the homeless- a safe place to get out of the heat or into the warmth of a comfortable chair. They are welcomed and encouraged perhaps to look at a magazine or two. They are seldom any bother.