Course:LIBR548F/2010WT1/Personal Libraries

A personal library is a collection of books and other information resources that is assembled by a single person for the private use of the owner or the owner's immediate family.

In the library and information science literature, this type of library is most commonly called a private library, although the term private library is occasionally extended to include the libraries established by clubs or associations, and sometimes even more broadly to any library that is not open to the general public, although it is more precise to refer to the libraries of private enterprises, government bodies, and so forth as special libraries. The Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science defines a private library as “any library that is not supported by public funds” , a definition that is not altogether satisfactory in that many government agencies maintain special libraries that are not available to the general public, and yet are supported by public funds.

The personal library in history

The earliest libraries known date back to bronze age civilizations in the ancient Middle East, where collections of book-like objects were first found in associations with palaces and temple complexes. These collections may have been nominally associated with a king or high priest, but in practice would have been assembled, cared for, and used by a coterie of scribes or clerics and therefore would have more in common with a modern special library than either a personal library or a public library.

Libraries that are identified as the property of a single owner (a scholar or aristocrat) do not appear in history until the flourishing of the Graeco-Roman civilization. The enabling factors for the establishment of private libraries are an increased level of literacy in the population and the availability of commercially traded books. In the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle was said to have collected a personal library that rivaled that of many kings (generations after Aristotle's death, his collection, still intact, was purchased by a wealthy Athenian bibliophile named Apellicon, and it subsequently fell into the hands of the Roman general Sulla who seized the books during the conquest of Athens and brought them back to Italy to add to his personal collection). The expansion of the Roman Republic outside its Italian homeland made rich men out of its military and political elites, while creating an insatiable appetite for Greek culture. By the middle of the second century B.C.E, there is evidence for the accumulation of books in both Latin and Greek in private collections. Although public libraries became widely accessible during imperial times, aristocrats continued to cultivate their private libraries, especially in their rural villas, where they would have no access to the great reading rooms of the capital.

The barbarian invasions and the social upheavals that marked the end of the Roman Empire resulted in the destruction of most of the private and public libraries of classical antiquity. The resumption of private book collecting on a large scale had to wait until the return of wide-spread literacy and the re-establishment of trade, and was greatly facilitated by the invention of moveable type and the printing press.

In both ancient times and modern, the personal libraries of scholars or aristocrats sometimes became the nucleus around which large, institutional libraries evolved. A modern example is the private library of Thomas Jefferson, which became the core of the United States Library of Congress.

The personal library and the history of the book

The simplest study of a private library is an enumerative or descriptive bibliography, and catalogues of this nature can be useful for booksellers and book collectors who want to track the provenance of an item. Catalogues can also be the starting point of a more complex historical, sociological, or literary analysis of a private library and its owners. Because a private library is often the creation of a single individual, analyzing private libraries can provide insights into the reading – or, at least the collecting – habits of individual readers that remain obscured in the aggregate institutions of book culture, such as booksellers and multi-user libraries.

In many cases, study of the personal library of an writer can shed light into the writer's influences and in some cases the origins of the writer's ideas. For example, an analysis of the contents of the small traveling library that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche kept with him in his final years of active work reveals that Nietzsche's reading and literary influences were actually quite different than what his autobiographical works suggest.

The study of public libraries also illuminates larger trends in book culture. For example, the stages of decline of the English landed aristocracy explains and is documented by the massive sales of rare and antiquarian books associated with the dispersal of the libraries of the great country houses, beginning with the agricultural crisis of the 1840s, and continuing through the social and political changes triggered by the two world wars. This process had far-reaching consequences that included the enrichment of American research libraries who were able to acquire valuable primary source materials, both through the medium of booksellers and by way of wealthy American collectors and patrons of the arts who subsequently passed on some of their spoils to the universities that they supported.

Future of the private library

As a physical construct, the private library has remained largely unchanged since the codex replaced the scroll as the physical form of the book: a book collector from renaissance times would have little difficulty finding his or her way around the library of a wealthy or cultured collector of books in our own time. It is difficult to imagine how the private library will respond in response to the changes in technology that are reshaping the way we read and respond to written information, but possibly some analogies can be drawn with the advent of digital music. One possibility is that the impulse to collect may become increasingly divorced from the need for information, with collector's-quality bound volumes meeting the former need and digital resources meeting the latter. Digital music collections allow ease of sharing among users and in a greater variety of listening environments, but at the same time digital collections tend to be ephemeral and not only fail to outlive the collector, but in many cases, fail to outlive the electronic device on which they are shared. The most likely outcome is that private users of books will continue to collect them, but in different media depending on the uses for which the collected books are intended.

Further reading

Brobjer, T. H. (1997) Nietzsche's Reading and Private Library, 1885-1889. Journal of the History of Ideas, 58(4):663-693

Casson, Lionel (2001). Libraries in the Ancient World. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.

Reid, Peter H. (2001). The Decline and Fall of the British Country House Library. Libraries and Culture 36(2):345-366

Online resources

The Private Libraries Association. http://www.plabooks.org/