The Meaning of Night

^*[The Roxburghe Club was founded in 1812, at the height of the bibliomania craze, by the bibliophile and bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847). Ed.]

^*[Mrs Daunt was born in April 1797, so she was 56 when the narrator first encountered her in October 1853. Ed.]

^†[Thomas Taylor, ‘the English pagan’ (1758–1835), who devoted himself to translating and expounding the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and the Pythagoreans. He was an important influence on William Blake and on the Romantic poets (Shelley in particular), and much later on W. B. Yeats. Ed.]

^‡[‘Concerning the Cave of the Nymphs’, an allegorizing interpretation of the Cave of the Nymphs on the island of Ithaca, described by Homer in the Odyssey, Book XIII. Ed.]

^*[Taylor’s translation of Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, which dealt with such matters as theurgy and divination, was published in 1821. Iamblichus (c.AD 245-c.325), born in Syria, was a Neoplatonist philosopher. Ed.]

^†[Despite extensive searching, I cannot find that Dr Daunt’s translation and commentary were ever published in the Classical Journal, even though they apparently reached proof stage. Ed.]

^‡[A native of Messene, perhaps active as late as 280 BC. He wrote an influential fantasy travel novel, the Hiera anagraph, known mainly through fragments in the work of Diodorus Siculus; it was also quoted by the Christian apologist Lactantius. Ed.]

^*[i.e. what are now termed ‘incunabula’ (from the Latin ‘things in the cradle’), meaning books produced in the infancy of printing in the late fifteenth century. Ed.]

^*[John Burstall (1774–1840)was a close contemporary of the celebrated bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1818 he published Plantin of Antwerp, a pioneering study of Christophe Plantin (1514–89), the French-born bookbinder and printer. Ed.]

^†[Owen Felltham or Feltham (1602?–68), essayist and poet. The first edition, or century, of his famous collection of moral essays and maxims was published c. 1623. It proved extremely popular and went through twelve editions by 1709. Ed.]

24

Littera scripta manet^*

We were standing before the great West Front, with its prospect of carefully tended pleasure-gardens, and the distant mass of Molesey Woods. A paved terrace, balustraded and lined with great urns – that same terrace where I had made the photographic portrait of Lord Tansor – stretched the length of this western range.

As we entered the Library, the late-afternoon sun, streaming through the line of tall arched windows, transformed the interior of the great room into a dazzling confection of white and gold. Above us, Verrio’s ceiling was a misty swirl of colour; around us, rising from floor to ceiling on three sides of the huge space, was a glorious vista of white-painted book-cases, arranged in tall colonnaded bays. My eyes gorged on the sight that lay before me: row upon row of books of every type – folios, quartos, octavos, duodecimos, eighteenmos – exhibiting every facet of the printer’s and binder’s art.

Taking a pair of white cotton gloves from his pocket, and drawing them carefully over his hands, Dr Daunt walked over to one of the bays, and reached up to remove a thick folio.

‘What do you think of this?’ he asked, gently laying the volume down on an elaborately carved giltwood table.

It was a perfect copy of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, translated and printed by Caxton at Westminster in 1483: a volume of superlative rarity and importance. Dr Daunt procured another pair of cotton gloves from the drawer of the table, and offered them to me. My hands were shaking slightly as I opened the massive folio, and gazed in awe at the noble black-letter printing.

‘The Golden Legend,’ said the Rector, in hushed tones. ‘The most widely read book in late mediaeval Christendom after the Bible.’

Reverently, I turned over the huge leaves, lingering for some moments on an arresting woodcut of the Saints in Glory, before my eye was caught by a passage in the ‘Lyf of Adam’:

A place of desire and delights. No better description of Evenwood could be found. And this paradise would one day be mine, when all was accomplished at last. I would breathe its air, wander its rooms and corridors, and take my ease in its courtyards and gardens. But greater than all these delights would be the possession of this wondrous library for my own use and pleasure. What more could my bibliophile’s soul ask for? Here were marvels without end, treasures beyond knowing. You have seen the worst of me in these confessions. Here, then, let me throw into the opposite side of the balance, what I truly believe is the best of me: my devotion to the mental life, to those truly divine faculties of intellect and imagination which, when exercised to the utmost, can make gods of us all.

‘This’, said Dr Daunt, laying his hand on the great folio that had so entranced my soul, ‘was the first volume for which I wrote a description. I remember it as if it were yesterday. August 1830. The 29th day-a day of furious wind and rain, as I recall, and so dark, if you will believe it for that time of the year, that you could hardly see beyond the terrace. We had the lamps burning in here all day long. The book was not in its proper place – you will observe that the bays in this section of the Library are arranged in alphabetical order by author – and I thought at first to remove it to where it belonged, and make my acquaintance with it at some later date; but then, on a whim, I decided to deal with it then and there. And so it has retained a special place in my heart.’

He was smiling to himself as he stroked his long beard and gazed fondly at the open folio. I felt a great closeness to the dear old fellow in that moment, and caught myself wishing that I had had such a man as my father.

He returned the book to its place, and then took down another: Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Angliae, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1516. As he left me to pore over this, he strode over to another bay and brought back the first printing of Walter Hylton’s great mystical treatise, the Scala Perfectionis, the Ladder of Perfection, printed, again by de Worde, in 1494, and the first book to which he put his name. I had hardly begun to examine it when he hurried back with yet another treasure – Pynson’s reprint of the Ars Moriendi. Then off he went again, returning this time with St Jerome’s Vitas Patrum, Caxton’s translation, completed on the last day of his life, and exquisitely printed in folio by de Worde in 1496.