Left to right: Philip Harvey, Jean-Dominique Mellot, Wallace Kirsop
Photograph: Susan Southall
On Tuesday
the Carmelite Library received a visit from the Chief Curator (Conservateur General) of the Bibliothèque nationale
de France (BnF). Jean-Dominique Mellot is in Melbourne to give this year’s
Foxcroft Lecture at the State Library of Victoria. The lecture, entitled ‘Policing the Parisian book trade in the Age of Enlightenment’, reflects
his central interest in the history of the book, and more especially the French
book. M. Mellot was being shown around town by the scholar and bibliophile in
French culture, Wallace Kirsop.
Jean-Dominique Mellot has also written in Carmelite history, most
significantly his two-volume work which we hold in the Library, ‘Histoire du
Carmel de Pontoise’ (Desclée de Brouwer, 1994-2005). This book, he told us, was written after an approach by the municipality of
Pontoise, a commune on the outskirts of Paris, as one means of preserving the
ancient Carmel from sale and development. His efforts have been successful: the
threat to the foundation has been resolved.
Pontoise is the oldest discalced Carmel in France, established by Marie
of the Incarnation (“La belle Acarie”) in 1605, during the long period of
religious upheaval in that country. The first Carmelites to live at Pontoise
were Spanish Teresians, themselves none too keen to venture into such a
dangerous environment. The convent’s later restoration after the Revolution of
1789 makes it one of the longest surviving religious houses in France.
Conversation turned to library matters. One of M. Mellot’s main challenges
is to pull into line the immense rare collections of the BnF. As Chief Curator
he is Chef du service de l'Inventaire rétrospectif à la
Bibliothèque nationale de France. This means that one of the central tasks is
cataloguing, the kind of specialist cataloguing required for such material. He
said that something like 30% of early imprints lack a firm date, one of the
essential requirements of historical research, not least in the subject of
religion.
He is in the process of devising charts to
map the lifespans of publishing houses – sometimes an eon, sometimes just a flicker
of time – in order to match when different works, or impressions of works, were
likely to have been published. I reminisced on Australia’s own Early Imprint
Project (EIP) of the early eighties, a much more manageable endeavour than that
facing M. Mellot. The idea was to record all books published before 1801 held
in Australian libraries, a collective snapshot of a nation’s holdings. I asked
if the turn of the nineteenth century was a useful cut-off date when defining
an early imprint. 1830 was the sharp reply, the moment when the hand press
started being taken over by industrial machine printing.
In a fitting and mannerly way, we bewailed
the sudden closures of religious houses, more especially the rapid disposal or
dispersal of their precious libraries. This seems to be as common in France as
in Australia. With the stroke of a pen, or just the stroke of midnight,
valuable collections built up over decades can be removed by a religious superior,
without consultation or thought. The Carmelite Library’s donations policy was
put in place to catch some of this precious heritage, rather than letting it
vanish into oblivion. The French have the same idea, though of course on a
vastly grander scale. Their religious houses are brimming with books,
manuscripts, and archival materials vital to the historical as well as the
spiritual record.
M. Mellot spoke of legal deposit, France
being the first country in the world, under King Francis the First, to
establish this practical collecting device and safety check on publishing and
inheritance. The King signed the Ordonnance
de Montpellier in late December 1537, coming into effect in 1538. Legal deposit
is effective but never thorough. No library can hope to receive one copy of
every published title. He good-naturedly complained of those through time who
took books from legal deposit collections at the BnF, thus setting librarians today,
himself included, the task of chasing lost titles through dealers,
antiquarians, and other collectors.
1538 caught my attention, as that is the year
of publication of the Carmelite Library’s oldest rare book, ‘Disputationes adversus Lutheranos per proloquia seu pronunciata caeteris
eorum articulis opposita’, by the Carmelite of Ferrara, Giovanni Maria Verrato.
This book was passed around, out of interest, as we considered that by 1538
people could argue all they liked with those wretched Lutherans, the horse had
already bolted.
From what I could grasp, it seems the BnF wishes to collect two copies of
each title, one for general access and one for permanent storage. This means
that even if the general access copy should go missing, there is still at least
one print copy of the book in existence. This concern has become more, not
less, pressing in our e-world, as the rapid changes in technology come with
built-in obsolescence. Yesterday’s CD-Rom disc is unreadable without yesterday’s
outmoded equipment, whereas the printed book is always readable, and always
available for copy in new formats. Preservation of at least one copy of a title
is my objective when insisting that the same practice be upheld within the
University of Divinity libraries, of which the Carmelite Library is one member.
The University has free access to a wealth of specialist literature from all
centuries of the print era. We need to be sure that these titles do not vanish
out of the system.
All of this collecting leads to one overwhelming question: space. The BnF
is currently rebuilding at Rue de Richelieu. After his Australian tour is
completed, M. Mellot returns to Paris and the immense tasks of mapping the
publishing past and renovating for the library’s future.
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