Friday 20 July 2007

St. Paul's Cathedral Library

The St. Paul’s Cathedral Library is definitely one of the smaller and more picturesque libraries I’ve ever been in, it looks much more like a personal library than one that has been in much use for a general public and I’m sure in some aspects it will remain a bit of a secret. It seems it would be easy to keep that library a secret anyway, it’s at the top of the Geometric staircase (also, he told us, filmed for one of the Harry Potter films and I recognized that it was used as part of the entrance to Dumbledore’s office) with few signposts and a door that’s located next to what look like unvisited galleries of busts.

Our guide to the library and the spaces it occupies on an upper floor of St. Paul’s was Joe Wisdom, the head librarian, and I’m sure the person who determines who will be let into the library to use the materials, or as he said ‘make good use of the materials.’ It was very hard to tell what the range and scope of the actual collection was, it was re-assembled for St. Paul’s after the Great Fire starting with the donation of Henry Compton, the Bishop of London’s collection.

The books are along all of the walls of the room, on two levels and the woodwork as well as the seemingly mystifying catalogue system reminded me very much of the library at Trinity College in Dublin with its neverending double letters next to shelves with no shelfmarks actually present on the books. The library is also going through some major conservational projects and inventory for the use of conservation. Wisdom reminded us of the large differences between conservation and preservation and restoration and I wondered about the tape the library was using to keep boards on the books. It reminded me of the Art Librarian at the University of Iowa’s campaign against post-it notes and I was thinking perhaps the fabric tape would also leave marks or take off some of the elderly leather keeping the St. Paul’s Library’s volumes together.

One of the main highlights of the tour of the library and essentially the behind-the-scenes of St. Paul’s was one of the rooms intended to be a library reading room wherein lies Sir Christopher Wren’s ‘Great Model’ of what he originally intended for the cathedral. It was rejected for being too Catholic, which seems strange for a cathedral, but this is England after all. The Great Model can apparently be sectioned off to show what Wren’s intentions for the inside of the cathedral were as well, however we saw it intact from the outside only, my first inclination when I saw it was to wonder what it would look like with dolls in it, as it resembles a giant dolls’ cathedral more so to me than an architectural model, so I was well impressed.

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