all kinds of writing
Samuel Pepys, shortly before his death in 1703, decided to leave the entire contents of his library to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Now I managed to spend three years at my own college, Saint John’s, without making the arduous trip of four or five minutes across the road to see the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, one of the joys of Cambridge, for myself.
But, having read the entire Pepys’ Diaries aloud to Jane over several months [see earlier entries] I decided to make up this sad omission on my very next trip, which turned out to be last weekend, when one of the formal Johnian Dinners for my own year came up, as it does every few years.
Look at the photo above. It shows most of the 12 beautiful oak bookcases (called ‘presses’ by Pepys) the first of which were designed by him with the invaluable help of one of his subordinates, Thomas Simpson, master joiner of Deptford and Woolwich dockyards. They started work on the first press on 23 July, 1666, as the entry for that day confirms:
And then comes Simpson the Joyner, and he and I with great pains contriving presses to put my books up in; they now growing numerous, and lying one upon another on my chairs, I lose the use [of the chairs], to avoid the trouble of removing them when I would open a book.
The following month he records that Simpson helped him to set up a second press, and he made do with these two during the whole period of the diary, 1660-1669, each of them holding about 250 books.
They were arranged by height, not by subject, with - as you can see - the larger Folio volumes at the bottom. On the row above there are the smallest Octavo books in front, with larger ones set back above them. And so it goes, uniformly, with books numbered from 1, the smallest, to 3,000, the largest.
This system, as well as being pleasing to the eye, allowed a maximum number of books to be housed in the space available, and Pepys trained his clerks to use the various indices he had devised, not only alphabetical but also by subject, so that a given volume could be found quite quickly.
I say ‘volume’ rather than ‘book’, since many of the works to be found in his library actually contain numbers of documents bound together: collections of medieval drawings; the works of early engravers from Dürer onwards; maps, prints and drawings of London; and, of especial interest, five large albums containing over 1700 broad-sheet ballads, which Pepys was assiduous in collecting, much to the delight of historians.
The visual appeal is increased by the quality of the bindings, most of which were chosen by Pepys himself to increase the feeling of uniformity, though he naturally kept the original bindings of the older works when these were valuable, or especially pleasing to the eye.
Some works of especial interest were housed in the sides of the desk, also original, which you can see in the photo at the top. The College, following the removal of the library to Cambridge 21 years after the death of their benefactor, has added various display cabinets, which means that the visitor can see details of a number of the works collected which otherwise would be closed away. (These include the diarist’s own copy of Newton’s Principia, a first edition from 1686 bearing Pepys’s imprimatur as President of the Royal Society, under whose auspices the work appeared).
But, however valuable many of the works housed in the library are, the most precious and irreplaceable are the six bound volumes of the Diaries themselves. So, do visit the Library if you are ever in Cambridge; but make sure that, at the very least, you read a selection of the diaries beforehand, if you have not done so already. Then go on to Claire Tomalin’s “Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self”, to find out what happened to the man in the remaining thirty-four years of his life after unbearable eye-strain forced him to abandon his diary, to the sadness of generations of faithful and devoted readers.
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The young woman on duty the day I visited was both informative and friendly, and it was from here that I learned that the bookcases - possibly the very first glass-fronted ones in the world - managed to survive the journey from Pepys’s original house to his next residence in Buckingham Street (a minute’s walk from the riverside in those pre-Embankment days), then on to his final home in the little village of Clapham and, ultimately, to Cambridge, without a single pane of glass breaking: a tribute to the original design, which allowed for the presses easily to be taken to pieces and re-assembled.
For more about the Library, including opening hours, go to
Finally visiting the Pepys Library
Friday, 3 July 2015
