Four Hundred Years of History Within Four Hundred Feet

Between the walk from the train station in Oxford to the moment you enter the Old School’s Quadrangle of Oxford University, you are transported 400 years in the past. As you walk into the Old Divinity School, you are stepping even further into the past and you can imagine monks from all over Britain and Europe sitting in this late English Gothic room with vaulted ceilings, pouring over religious texts in Latin and Greek. Our tour guide, David Knowles, was a tall Englishman with much knowledge and a quick wit. (He also went to Cambridge so he may have been slightly biased).

David took us on a tour of the Bodleian Library, one of several that exist in Oxford. This is the oldest and holds the richest materials in the collection. Above the Old Divinity School is the most famous aspect of the building: Duke Humfrey’s Library. In the mid-1400s, the duke gifted his manuscript collection of 250 items to Oxford. They built the library to hold these manuscripts but it soon fell into disrepair as the printing press took the world by storm. However, in 1600, Thomas Bodley wrote to the chancellor of Oxford, informing him that he wished to spend his own money to refurbish the Duke’s library. Thus, the Bodleian Library was formed and it has continued to grow in size ever since. Bodley even instituted his own catalog system in 1605, and was out of space by 1607. He then built more bookshelves on the outside of the original library, which are believed to be the first example of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in Britain.

Since then, the collection at Oxford Library has grown to epic proportions. Here are some facts about the library today:

• The Radcliffe Camera is a building to the south of the Bodleian. It has several reading rooms and there were underground bookshelves and a tunnel that connected it to…
• The New Bodleian. This was finished by 1948 and it used to hold some 4 million books. It is currently under construction and will be completed by 2015. Thus, about 98% of the library’s 11 million books are located about a half hour away.
• It is a non-lending library so users cannot take out books and must come to one of the 32 reading rooms to use the collection.
• It also has a copy of every book published in the UK since 1600.

Oxford is such an interesting place and the library is just fascinating. One can see the transformation of architecture in England from the 1400s to the 1700s. There is a 1400s English-Style Gothic, Renaissance-style 200 years after the fact, and 1300s Jacobean Gothic. If one is looking for the history of the town and the university, one should go no further than the Bodleian.