St John’s College Library Newsletter L
Lent 2024
VOLUME 7, ISSUE 2
The Old Library 1624–2024: a celebration of 400 years Pretend for a moment that a library is simply a building with a stated purpose, and you’ll be able to agree, without quibbles, that the Old Library of St John’s is four hundred years old this year. We’re embracing the idea, with an exhibition marking four centuries of a building that wasn’t considered ‘old’ for quite a stretch of its history. In 1624, it was brand new. But the Library’s interior, with those beautiful oak bookcases, wasn’t considered complete till 1628. Books poured in by way of donation and bequest for many a decade, necessitating the 18th-century raising of the cases to create more shelf space (by which point the shelf lists were no longer being updated, because who had the energy?). Volumes of theology and medicine and lexicography and history moved around the room, their classmarks repeatedly altered, as the librarians sought to maximise the number of books that could be accommodated. And there was the Victorian expansion from the Upper Library into the Lower, and the 1994 opening of the new (is it still new?) Working Library. Appropriate, then, that the physical exhibition, offering many images pertaining to the Library’s history as well as a selection of beautiful volumes from the shelves, is sited in the Exhibition Area, at the hinge, as it were, between the Working and the Old. Architecturally and functionally, the two are really one, branching off and supporting each other rather than proceeding in parallel. A line hasn’t been drawn under the Library yet, and that’s as it should be.
But the exhibition does draw a line of sorts under Sub-Librarian and Special Collections Librarian Kathryn McKee, who left in December for a new post in Sheffield. Kathryn worked in the Library for a larger portion of the last four hundred years than she’d likely care to see specified; we’re grateful that she found time, during an especially hectic Michaelmas term, to put together the exhibition as only she could. The sort of person who willingly reads this far in a library newsletter article about an exhibition about a library doesn’t need to be told this, but as well as a quantity of books and somewhere to keep them, a library is the people who catalogue, conserve and curate it, along with those who consult the material and propagate their findings. Even if the names of most of these people mostly go unremembered, their importance – their knowledge and patience and cooperation – mustn’t be. It’s thanks to such contributors that the place feels less four hundred years old than four hundred years alive; still going, and still growing. The quatercentenary celebration can be viewed in the Library Exhibition Area, 9.00–17.00, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays) until 19 April 2024; an online version is available at https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/quatercentenary-old-library. Header image: Detail from an Old Library bookcase designed by Henry Man. Photograph by Paul Everest. Adam Crothers, Special Collections Assistant