Nothing new under the sun

December 13, 2014 8:18 AM

So how did medieval readers locate books, especially when they owned a lot of them? The answer lies in a neat trick that resembles our modern GPS : a book was tagged with a unique identifier (a shelfmark) that was entered into a searchable database (a library catalogue), which could subsequently be consulted with a handheld device (a portable version of the catalogue). Here is how to plot the route to a specific book in the medieval library.

Lagniappe

Medieval Spam: The Oldest Advertisements for Books

Facebook Before Facebook: Tagging in Antiquity

and rabbit hole.

posted by infini (18 comments total)

Wait, isn't the Dewey Decimal System a more apt metaphor than a GPS?
posted by johnnydummkopf at 8:23 AM on December 13, 2014 [5 favorites]

Yeah, either Dewey or LC has been doing this since... well, not time immemorial, exactly, but it would have been nice if the author had given a nod to modern classification systems, since the ones he talks about here are obvious precursors. (Well, obvious to librarians.) Next up: subject classifications as hyperlinks.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:10 AM on December 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

There must be a German word for writing an article on a subject that is pretty cool in its own right and trying to sex it up with a basically unsuitable reference, thereby revealing you don't understand either subject very well.
posted by Dr Dracator at 9:11 AM on December 13, 2014 [16 favorites]

Gekwakkelheit.
posted by Etrigan at 9:34 AM on December 13, 2014

Ancient players of chess used a fiendishly complicated code of letters and numbers to describe the positions and moves on the board, just like GPS! And they named the pieces after powerful offices within society, foreshadowing Monopoly and the stock market and electronic trading!
posted by XMLicious at 10:00 AM on December 13, 2014 [9 favorites]

no no no, you see, in ye olden dayes, a Lord would have four or more super-precise Royal Timekeepers placed at the far reaches of his lands, and they would each bellow out the time, and there would be this army of scribes following the librarian around scribbling out the positioning calculations as they heard each timekeeper's cry and uh... this would yield the latitude and longitude of their current location in the library (which was obviously kept outdoors, because how else could you hear the shouting of all the far flung Royal Timekeepers?) and from there you could just plot the course required to reach the latitude and longitude of whatever book you were looking for.
posted by indubitable at 10:03 AM on December 13, 2014 [7 favorites]

a Lord would have four or more super-precise Royal Timekeepers

Arranged in some sort of timecube, perhaps?
posted by johnnydummkopf at 11:11 AM on December 13, 2014

... And that's how Times Square got it's name!
posted by sevenyearlurk at 11:19 AM on December 13, 2014 [5 favorites]

well, it's not at all like GPS, but similar to turn-by-turn navigation.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:19 PM on December 13, 2014

Yeah when people say they used GPS to get somewhere, they're referring to the thing that told them to turn left in 500 feet, not something that told them the latitude and longitude.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:16 PM on December 13, 2014

Still pretty interesting.
posted by uosuaq at 2:59 PM on December 13, 2014

> writing an article on a subject that is pretty cool in its own right and trying to sex it up with a basically unsuitable reference, thereby revealing you don't understand either subject very well.

Do you actually have evidence that the author doesn't understand medieval library devices, or are you just going for cheap and pointless snark?

Cheap and pointless comments aside, an interesting and well-illustrated piece, and I thank infini for posting it.
posted by languagehat at 3:22 PM on December 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

I can see both how the modern technology hook seems necessary (nobody's going to read my article if I say it's about the medieval Dewey Decimal system) and how it seems annoying. ( It's misrepresenting what it actually does. )

Something that tells you the position of all the books but doesn't tell you your own position is more what I would call a map. The idea of each page representing a lectern, that is a very elegant approach to mapping a library. I'm also amused they would paste the library's contents directly on a wall.

The "spam" article similarly equates all advertising and spam. None of the examples appear to be direct mail marketing. I do love the scribes advertising their business in the back of the book.
posted by RobotHero at 3:23 PM on December 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

I think it would be really interesting to look at how small private or semi-private libraries catalogue their books. From my own experience with university department libraries (which are often separate from the main university library with its librarians who know how to do things, relying instead on volunteer researchers/grad students to set up a "system", and which only fill maybe one or two rooms), people come up with all sorts of weird and wonderful ways to catalogue (or not).

In one, at a university in Germany, books were shelved according to what language they were written in, rather than subject matter or author, and the card catalogue was all in the original languages and scripts for each book. So good luck finding a Russian book relevant to your research if you can't read Cyrillic. On the other hand, I guess you are unlikely to need a Russian book if you can't read it. But it would be nice to know it was there, I think. And I'm pretty sure the index cards in Georgian script or Tocharian were of very little use to anyone.

In another, they went for the inventory-only approach. The "catalogue" was a notebook where each book added to the library was entered by hand as it came in. So it was several hundred pages of listed books, in no order besides date of purchase, and no information about where the book was to be found. Books were shelved according roughly to subject matter (on purpose) and then within the subject areas, according to age (accidentally, because people would just add new books to the end of the shelf as they came in.) It meant that multiple editions of the same book would not be next to each other.

To borrow a book, you signed the notebook next to the entry for the book you took, and crossed out your signature again when you returned it. (If you ever returned it).
posted by lollusc at 6:12 PM on December 13, 2014

nobody's going to read my article if I say it's about the medieval Dewey Decimal system

I think anyone who would read the article with interest would find the Dewey angle more intriguing. My instant assumption was that the author is just a Young and doesn't know much about Dewey because of digital humanities and e-books etc., but often uses GPS to find things they're looking for (cupcake tattoo salons, lumberjack birderies, etc.) and so that was their go-to metaphor. Still a great article!
posted by No-sword at 9:55 PM on December 13, 2014

Why do you all keep bringing up the Dewey Decimal system? This system is nothing like the Dewey Decimal system. (OK, the Lopsen Abbey system is a little like it.) I can know that a library book's Dewey Decimal number is, say, 640.8, but there isn't a shelf called "640" (mostly likely), and the book I'm seeking isn't the 8th book on that shelf. The great thing about the Dewey Decimal system is that it's not related to the physical layout of the particular library, so that a book can be 640.8 in every library.

But the medieval system is about being forever on a particular shelf, a particular number of books in—once a book is the third book on the second shelf, it's always going to be there. You get a new book, it goes on the last shelf, no matter what its subject matter(s) might be. It's stuck with those physical coordinates, and on that physical shelf, forever. Again, that's the opposite of how the Dewey Decimal system works, where you put similarly related books next to each other, and where books are located on the shelves might change over time if you buy a bunch of books in the 400s or whatever.
posted by Casuistry at 11:20 PM on December 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

That's a great point, Casuistry! I guess the real problem is that I am an Old, who still thinks of GPS as something that tells you where you are rather than a catch-all term for the general service of telling you where the stuff you want is (relative to where you are).
posted by No-sword at 1:37 AM on December 14, 2014

A GPS co-ordinate can tell you where you are now. But if you make a note of it, it can be used later by someone else to make their way to the same spot. That is how the article is using the term.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 6:55 AM on December 14, 2014