The Central Institute for Book Pathology is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, March 20, 2007. It is part of Objet Trouvé.
An unusual museum in Rome.
This article is dedicated to Peacay and his fine website, BibliOdyssey.
The Instituto Centrale per la Patologia del Libro, or Central Institute for the Pathology of the Book, in Central Rome sounds as if it might be a treatment facility for persons — like myself — who have a nearly insane love for books, but it turns out to be a research facility dedicated to the preservation of books against all forms of harm.
1. Writing about his decision to name the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos, Eco wrote “some debts must be paid.”
My mind was filled with images of Borges, that great blind librarian, and his likeness in Eco’s Name of the Rose1, when I visited the Institute. They informed me that it was not fully open to the public, but that I could make an appointment to be led through the facility’s museum. The next morning I descended into the basement under the guidance of a researcher who turned to me as we exited the lift and said, “this place is a labyrinth.”
The aftermath of the Turin National Library’s great fire of January, 1904. Hundreds of thousands of books and thousands of manuscripts were destroyed.
The Labyrinth
2. A museum of the museum, which could only be better if the museum was itself a museum of museums.
The museum features a series of displays concerning the Anatomy of the Book, the History of Paper, Animal Skins and Parchment, the Making of a Codex, and has several display cases dedicated to different forms of book pathogen. The first set of cases after those that deal with the history of the museum itself2 are concerned with the evolution of paper.
3. The term codex is derived from an obsolete late Latin term for a tree trunk.
Older codices were made from sheets of parchment, itself produced from the limed and scraped hides of sheep, goats, and cows. The parchments was held in a set of wooden frames cut from a cross-sectional slice of tree trunk3. The same sort of wood was used for the frame elements and covers of books well after paper was adopted.
Rag Paper
An early watermark from which we receive the modern term “fool’s cap” for certain sizes of paper.
T’sai Lun, a Chinese eunuch courtier, perfected paper manufacture around 105CE. The technology drifted westward through Vietnam and Tibet to Samarkand, where Arab traders learnt the craft in the 8th century. Paper, which was much cheaper to produce than parchment, spread to the entire Arab world, including Islamic Spain, from which it was exported to paper markets in Amalfi and Genoa. The Italians built the first Arab-style paper mill in Christian Europe at Fabriano around 1276, where the watermark was developed as an early product branding strategy.
This early paper was known as “rag paper” because it was made by rendering linen or hemp rags into a pulp that was then pressed onto screens and left to dry. The resulting product was considered too fragile to be useful for books, but it was immediately pressed into service for currency. The new currency was quite popular because it gave banks the ability to produce credit notes from a cheap and plentiful resource.
A popular song from the 16th century summarizes the effect of paper money upon the peasant class:
Rags make paper Paper makes money Money makes banks Banks make loans Loans make beggars Beggars make rags!
While it took the invention of the printing press to unseat parchment’s dominance within books, paper did immediately replace the wax tablet and stylus as the note-taking medium of most scribes.
Bibliophage
The next few cases are devoted to creatures that eat books. Silver fish, of course, and book lice — those tiny white creatures one sometimes finds between the pages — but also cockroaches, mice (which carried the plague into libraries), woodworms (which attract wasps), and termites. The various parasites that feed upon books also transport destructive fungi and excrete organic compounds that quicken the decay of paper.
A book that has been partially devoured by termites.
Fire and Brimstone
Although books are fragile things that slowly decay on their own, man oft hastens their demise through fire and war. In Europe, during the Second World War — although many precious books were moved to air-raid shelters — roughly 12 million books were destroyed, damaged or went missing. The museum contains a collection of damaged books, codices and manuscripts, along with photographs of the conditions under which they were found.
Damaged materials from the bombardment of Montecassino Abbey (14-16th February 1944) stored at the Institute.
Some texts are beyond the reach of even these highly trained codicologists. They reside within storage rooms beneath the institute awaiting technologies able to give new life to old words.