Foreword

Stella Halkyard's Clinic of the Soul

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;

They pursued it with forks and hope;

They threatened its life with a railway-share;

They charmed it with smiles and soap.'

The Hunting of the Snark, Fit the Fifth

The world comes to us in fragments and, by means of our uncanny narrative eye, we give those fragments the coherence of a story. Likewise, a library or an archive, made of textual bits and pieces, requires a beholder to lend it some (albeit arbitrary) sense. Sometimes the coherence has historical rigour, as when a researcher loops together official documents, private letters, laundry lists and doodles, to reconstruct an event or personality from the past. Other times the coherence depends on the reasercher's whimsey, choosing items that have caught the attention for no reason other than a come-hither look in the item's face. Psychologists tell us that the human brain seeks narrative in this apparent chaos of the universe. Confronted with a medley of random objects, sensations and events - thimbles, care, forks, hope, railway shares, smiles, soap - the brain attempts to link them and to lend them sense through grammatical connections that spell out a story: 'That's exactly the way [.] that the capture of Snarks should be tried.' For the human brain, nothing must remain unconnected.

Stella Halkyard confesses as much when she recalls what happened the first time she stepped into the John Rylands Library, almost half a century ago. 'Something in me "cottoned on",' she says, 'and, sparked by some ancestral nous, I recognised (etymologically speaking) the text in the textile history.' Halkyard's ancestors were bleachers, dyers, spinners and weavers in Lancashire's dark satanic mills, and something of their ancient craft of spinning flax into a product as profitable as gold has trickled down to their gifted heir. As if repeating a lesson learned from those Protestant elders, Halkyard quotes Henry Guppy, the Rylands' first librarian, to point out that it is not the beauty nor quantity nor rarity of the stuff hoarded in the magnificent Rylands halls that is important, but 'the use that is made of them'. This seems to Halkyard justification enough to rejoice in her haphazard findings and to guide us willy-nilly through the Rylands rabbit hole of knowledge, like Alice pointing out during her fall curiouser and curiouser things in the cupboards and bookshelves that line the walls. Unlike Alice, Halkyard does not pause to consider the dangers of dropping a jar labelled 'ORANGE MARMALADE' but, just like Alice, she notices the 'maps and pictures hung on pegs' and much other far less ordinary stuff: a royal handkerchief, a lock of hair as an emblem of lost time, a surgical method for restoring lopped-off noses, meticulous portraits of the moon, unfinished scraps of poetry. Of course, literary manuscripts and private letters come also under the gaze of her quirky eye, which lends the babel of collected things a welcome grammatical sense.

To collect is to lend order. This is apparent in our earliest sites. Prehistoric caves with bits of bones and broken tools compose in our mind a picture of the social life of our ancestors; burial grounds exhibit collections of disparate objects - jewelry, pottery, toys - that must have painted a portrait of the deceased in the eyes of ancient mourners. At some point in our history, these things were collected with a specific purpose in mind - ambition, curiosity, an aesthetic feeling, an intellectual quest - and might have provided the starting point of the yet-to-be imagined narrative. The universe might be chaotic but everything in it can be conceived as ordered.

There is a story by G. K. Chesterton, 'The Honour of Israel Gow', in which Father Brown is asked to solve the mysterious death of a Scottish lord. The only clues found in the lord's castle form a strange collection. First item: a considerable hoard of precious stones, without any settings whatsoever, which the lord kept loose in his pockets, like coins. Second item: heaps and heaps of snuff, not kept in a box or pouch but just lying on the mantelpiece or the piano. Third item: little wheels and springs of metal, as if someone had gutted a mechanical toy and left the parts scattered about. Fourth item: a number of wax candles but not a single candlestick. 'By no stretch of fancy,' remarks the illustrious Inspector Flambeau, 'can the human mind connect together snuff and diamonds and wax and loose clockwork.'

However, Father Brown thinks he can see the connection. He suggests that the late lord was obsessed with the French Revolution and tried to reenact the life of the last Bourbons. He had snuff because it was a luxury in the eighteenth century; wax candles because they were eighteenth-century lighting; bits of iron because they represented the locksmithing hobby of King Louis XVI; jewels because they represented Marie-Antoinette's diamond necklace.

'What a perfectly extraordinary notion!' cries Flambeau. 'Do you really think that is the truth?'

'I am perfectly sure it isn't,' Father Brown answers, 'only you said no one could connect snuff and diamonds and clockwork and candles. I give you that connection off-hand. The real truth, I am very sure, lies deeper.'

He then suggests that the late lord led a double life as a thief. The candles lit his way into the houses he robbed; he used snuff much as the fiercest criminals do, to throw into the eyes of his pursuers; the diamonds and cogs were used to cut his way through glass windows.

'Is that all that makes you think it the true explanation?' asks the bewildered Inspector.

'I don't think it the true explanation,' replies the priest calmly; 'but you said that nobody could connect the four things.'

It might be something simpler, he then suggests. The late lord found diamonds on his estate and kept the find a secret. The wheels were used to cut the stones. Snuff was used to bribe the Scottish peasants into searching the caves by the light of the candles.

'Is that all?' Flambeau asks. 'Have we got to the dull truth at last?'

'Oh no,' says Father Brown. 'I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly connect snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false philosophies will fit the universe.'

Any collection - especially an archival collection - has the qualities of a false (or at least an artificial) philosophy that will 'fit the universe', implicitly giving the individual pieces a common denominator that may not be apparent if they are seen separately. Like snuff and candles, diamonds and clockwork, certain delicate ephemera and certain exquisite bindings, twentieth-century ex-libris and an odd assortment of identity cards, early art magazines and early photo albums, together with limited editions of illustrated books belong, sub specie aeternitatis, to the world of print, but this, as a collector's label, is not quite satisfactory. Something else - more complex, deeper and ambiguous - is needed to conjure the collection into existence. The missing element is what became known, in Ancient Greece, as the eye of the beholder.

The trite dictum about beauty holds a truth: the coherence that a collection requires, and also its justification, lies with the first-person singular that is determined to create it. 'Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye,' observed the Princess of France in Love Labour's Lost. This is perhaps the intention of the divinity in the story of Genesis (who was perhaps the First Collector) when, according to the Talmudists, Jehovah created the world as a sort of cabinet in which to keep his toys. Perhaps that was also his gift to humankind, when after making Adam 'out of the dust of the ground' and placing him in a garden east of Eden, he brought to him all the creatures he had created to see what Adam would call them; and whatever Adam called every living creature, 'that was the name thereof.'

Adam's children inherited the divine collecting passion and became obsessive, tidy creatures who distrust chaos. Experiences of the world in which we live come to us with no recognizable system, for no intelligible reason, with blind and care-free generosity. And yet, in the face of every evidence to the contrary, we believe in law and order. Anxiously, we put everything away in files, in compartments, in distinct sections; feverishly we distribute, we classify, we label. We know that this thing we call the universe has no meaningful beginning or understandable end, no discernible purpose, no method in its madness. But we insist: it must make sense; it...