THE LIBRARY PAST AND FUTURE 219 



advantages which the new invention offered and before the marvel- 

 ous progress it made. It sought, moreover, the favor of the minia- 

 turists by leaving, in the margins \of the new codices, sufficient space 

 for ornamentations and for initials of burnished gold; it sought 

 the favor and the help of the learned humanists by employing them 

 to revise and correct the texts; it won the favor of the studious and 

 of clerks, who have at all times been poor, by spreading abroad 

 the texts of the classics, by offering for a few halfpence that which 

 could at first be obtained only w T ith gold or silver florins, by impart- 

 ing to all that which had been the privilege of the few. And we 

 must not forget the help given to typography by the invention of 

 the minor arts, calcography and xylography, which added new value 

 to the pages of the no longer despised book; so that printed codices 

 (codices impressi) might stand side by side with the manuscript 

 codices (codices manuscripti) . 



The word, the sign of the thought, first took on visible form with 

 the invention of the alphabet. But other ways of revealing thought 

 were to be discovered in the future. No one in the ancient world, 

 no one before the very culminating point of the Renaissance, could 

 have supposed it possible that a library might contain anything but 

 manuscripts; just as we, to-day, a*re incapable of imagining a library 

 containing anything but books. We have seen that the conception 

 of the book underwent expansion when printed books were added to 

 those written by hand; and in the same way the library underwent 

 expansion, gradually rising, between the fifteenth and the twentieth 

 centuries, from a simple collection of codices, to the vast and won- 

 derful proportions it has at present reached, assuming the duty of 

 receiving within itself any kind of graphic representation of human 

 thought, from clay tablets and inscribed stones and papyrus rolls, 

 to phototypes and monotype or linotype products, from books for 

 the blind written in the Braille alphabet to the new manuscripts of 

 the typewriters. 



From this brief compendium of bibliographical history one essen- 

 tial feature emerges. As though directed by an unswerving law, 

 by the law of reproduction, human thought feels the necessity of 

 expanding and of multiplying and perpetuating itself; and it is 

 ever searching for new means of carrying out this intent. Thus 

 the copyist or the scribe is replaced by the compositor, the minia- 

 turist by the engraver, the draftsman by the litbographer, the 

 painter by the color-printer, the engraver by the photographer and 

 zincographer; thus the machine replaces the hand of man, the 

 machine which is only concerned with working quickly, w 7 ith pro- 

 ducing as many copies as possible with diminished effort, with snatch- 

 ing her secrets from Mother Nature herself. We have replaced the 

 notac tironianae of the Roman scribes by the typewriter, the wax 



