Matt Kuhns

It's a tale of love and loss, of passion and betrayal, of seeming abandonment and disaster ending in a dramatic rescue.

A romance? A folktale? No; it's the history of Robert Cotton's library and how it eventually became one of the most important collections in the modern British Library. Along the way, it was imprisoned, ignored, neglected so badly that it almost went to pieces; once, the building housing it caught fire, with obviously disastrous results. And that is truly a tragedy. Robert Cotton, by diligence, interest, and the occasional theft, managed to gather one of the great libraries of England, containing (for instance) a very large fraction of the surviving material from the Old English era. It is a scholarly resource with few peers and no possible substitutes; for the oldest material, the Cotton copy is almost always the only one. The only copy, for instance, of Beowulf (damaged but not destroyed by the fire), of Asser's Life of Alfred [the Great], the only real biography of anyone who lived before the Norman Conquest. The only copy of the works of the Gawain-Poet (happily, those at least were saved). A beautifully illustrated manuscript of Genesis. And much more.

That's my one complaint about this book, which covers the entire history of the collection from the time Robert Cotton started it in the Elizabethan era to the time it settled in its final home in the British Library: It doesn't really say enough about the collection. There are occasional sidebars, describing Beowulf and such -- but they represent only a tiny fraction of the Cotton collection. Not everything Cotton collected was deeply interesting, to be sure -- but there is a lot more than this book tells you about.

To be sure, it is a history, not a library catalog. The book is well-written and reasonably well researched. If you just want to read about an amazing adventure that really shouldn't have been so amazing, were it not for a bunch of dunderheaded noblemen and politicians, it should be all you need.… (mehr)