By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian.
This little book would probably have been of great interest to my Victorian predecessors in the Cathedral Library: Henry B. Wheatley’s How to Catalogue a Library, published in 1889. It makes for amusing reading today but it’s not entirely out of date. After all, printed books haven’t changed all that much – they still feature covers, spines, title pages, prefaces, introductions, indexes and bibliographies. Some still have frontispieces.
Today, a cathedral librarian has no use for a vintage book on how to catalogue a library other than as a window into the past – our collections are catalogued online and searchable by anyone, anywhere. Even so, it feels poignant to have discovered this little book at the very end of an intensive six-month project to completely rearrange the Cathedral Library’s ‘modern’ post-1801 collections. Rearranging is not the same as cataloguing, of course, but it’s true to say that the work of preserving and providing access to historic collections is never done.
If you are a regular visitor to the Cathedral Library, you may have spotted some unfamiliar books on the Reading Room shelves and have pondered the whereabouts of certain other books that you’re sure you saw on the shelves last year. Until this year, the Cathedral Library’s core collections were, broadly speaking, divided into two sequences: pre-1801 and post-1801. The pre-1801 sequence was (and still is) housed in our secure and environmentally controlled Library and Archive Store, while the post-1801 sequence was split between the Store and the open shelves in the Reading Room.
It may be an obvious thing to say, but as time passes, the collections get older. Some of the books on the open shelves in the Reading Room were getting on for 225 years old – youthful compared to the great age of the Cathedral but a particularly fragile age for a book. There are now three sequences – pre-1801, post-1801 and post-1901 – and this new arrangement has ensured that all books published up to and including 1900 have retired to the more agreeable climate of the Library and Archive Store.
Henry B. Wheatley concluded that ‘bibliographers, like poets, are more often born than made’. Cathedral librarians are not so grandiose – but Wheatley would surely have agreed that there are few tasks more important than the everyday sorting, arranging, inventorying and cataloguing of – and caring for – our heritage collections.