Tuppence! Tuppence for everyone! The St. Paul's Library.

     

St. Paul's Cathedral and Millenium Bridge: Photo by Jenny Collins 

 Our first class took place at St. Paul's Cathedral and fans of Marry Poppins will be disapointed to hear that thought the pidgeons remain they don't appear to be getting much from the ole tuppence to birdseed trade like they used to. I think the pidgeon's are doing fine without it, but its always sad to see the old ways die out. At two pence I'm not even sure how much bird seed one could buy if they had the option.

The Librarian 

      Our guest instructor for the day was Joe Wisdom, the aptly named head librarian at St. Paul's. He met our class at the babtizmal fount, currently missing its cover because it's so dang heavy, wore an impeccable suite, spoke in a soft voice and was one of the most knowlegeable people I've met. He opened with some useful advise to all librarians out there, not just the baby ones like myself, "We don't do religion, politics, or gender, we're librarians." It's advise that I am going to have to try and take to heart. We walked with the tourists up the stairs, stopping about halfway up for Mr. Wisdom to remove a metal(and medieval) set of keys from his pocket. He opened one a large wooden door straight out of Hogwarts (fair warning now people the Harry Potter references are going to come fast and furious here, it's the nature of the nerdy beast) and we stepped into another world. We were under the main dome of St. Pauls and after gawking at that for a moment we prodeeded into the upper parts of the cathedral proper. As we walked down the hall we passed various artifacts, dating from a plethora of time periods. Mr. Wisdom referred to a number of them as "fiddly bits". He gave us the history of the cathedral as we walked; it was built by Christopher Wren in the English Baroque style and was brought into use in 1697.

The Great Model 

We were allowed into the room that contains the wooden model Wren had commissioned in 1674 to show his plan for the cathedral. The model is hugely impressive...and huge all my itself as it measures 10 yards long and about 5 and 1/2 feet high. It was the only model that Wren ever  had built, why you ask? Well it seems that once he had a model that the king could look at and appraise, the king started making demands and offering opinions. Some of them silly, like adding a bunch of gothic spires, and some of them architecturally unsound. You can almost feel Wren's frustration at the multitude of chefs in his kitchen in some of the facsimile drawings hung up around the room. The silliest of all of these drawings is the Warrent Design, a mish-mash of at least 8 different architectural styles that incorporated all of the kings demands for the cathedral. Surrounding it are facsimile editions of Wren's original drawings. The original plan was to use the real drawings, but as it would have been a conservation nightmare, they had copies made instead. It is difficult to control the temperature and the humidity within the cathedral, and these problems aside it would be near impossible to replace the windows with proper UV resistent glass. So the documents are preserved and safe, while the copies stand on display. The cathedral uses private consultants who work with the convervation team to make sure everything stays as prestine as possible. Humidity, temperature, and light all have to be controlled in order to makre sure that materials are safe for future generations.

The Great Model of St. Paul's: photo courtesy of http://www.stpauls.co.uk

The Library

 Once we'd gotten a taste of the materials in St. Paul's it was otnto the main event, the library. The library of St. Paul's isn't as large as one might think, but all of its space is used to the fullest with floor to ceiling shelves. The walls are carved stone, with books and ink well featureing prominently in the decoration of the library. You can get a look at the carvings in the above photo of the model room. The original plan was for St. Paul's to have two libraries, but when this plan fell through they ended up with the model room and the current library.

 The bulk of the archive of St. Paul's is held off site, due to spacing issues. The library suffered from the great London fire when it's own collection burned along with thousands of other books being stored in St. Paul's basement. Bishop Henry Compton helped to recovera number of the books and many of the books in St. Paul's fall under "grey literature", things that are below the radar. People know of the books existence but not really where they can find them. More books were added in the 19th century when Sparrow Simpson bought in massive amounts of material to the library. To this day they are still adding volumes to their collection but on a very limited basis. All together 23,000 bibliographic materials and 10,000 physical volumes are part of the St. Paul's collection. Currently there is no digitization process going on at St. Paul's and very little digitization but it is an area that Mr. Wisdom has stated the library is looking into. Use of the library and it's materials is open to whoever can make use of it, and Mr. Wisdom can be contacted through St. Paul's website.

In addition to his skills as a librarian, Mr. Wisdom is also very good an analyzing notebooks and informing you how long you can generally expect them to last as he demonstrated with all of our notebooks. I got high marks for paper quality but low marks for my spiral binding. Good thing I am putting all my notes in the blog!

 It was an amazing way to start a month of library centric exploring.

Links:
St. Paul's Cathedral Library Website
St. Paul's Website