Accessing unchained books
Upon entering Arts End in 1710, even the widely travelled Gelehrter, Z. C von Uffenbach momentarily could not supress his admiration.
It cannot be imagined that there could be so many books here, were it not for the height of the place.*
Above are the smaller volumes, in quarto, octavo and duodecimo, … into which no one is admitted without a Master of Arts or a librarian, so that nothing may be removed. Underneath are all kinds of folios bound together with chains…
Nothing in the Bodleian delighted von Uffenbach so much as the ingenious staircase installed in Arts End to reach the smaller, unchained books in the upper gallery.
To reach the upper corridors one ascends a charming staircase, so delicately and well built that it takes up little room, …. From it one can see how a staircase should be arranged, without spoiling the appearance, in a constricted space, and without itself suffering from lack of light.
Part of the solution is to enclose the staircase, not in solid panels, but in a grill of vertical and horizontal members ‘so that the light may fall through onto the staircase’ (a). However,
Most distinctive of all is [the fact] that the staircase has steps of two sorts and not, as is usual [in a spiral staircase], the broader part of the staircase on one side, the narrower on the other. Here four steps lie with the broad part to the left when one ascends [marked c, d, e, f], while the others [h, i. k, etc.] have the wide part to the right, so that two kinds of winding staircases are here combined – the lower half turning to the right, the upper to the left. The whole space involved amounts to only four and a half English feet in width … The staircase does not go up to the gallery, as where the last step of the spiral staircase ends, a straight one with five or six steps begins, so mounting that it projects from the base of the one already described. In the plan of the Bodleian Library in Oxonia Illustrata, the outside framework and also the stairs can to a certain extend be seen. (Image 1)
In order to illustrate this ingenious solution properly, von Uffenbach included a fine copper engraving in the third volume of his Travels (Image 2). This arrangements has been preserved unchanged to the present day (Image 3).
* He quickly contained himself, however, and hazarded a comparison with the famous Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel: ‘All the same, it appears to me that the Wolfenbüttel Library is almost richer in printed books, though the Bodleian excels it in the number and excellence of its manuscripts.’
Sources
Image 1. Loggan, Oxonia illustrata (1675), plate vii.
Image 2 and quotations. Z. C. von Uffenbach, Merckwürdige Reisen, 3 vols (Ulm, 1753-4), III, pp. 89, 91-93, and Fig. 1; English translation adapted from W.H. Quarrell and W.J.C. Quarrell, Oxford in 1710: from the Travels of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (Oxford, 1928), pp. 4, 5-7.
Image 3. Arts End, facing north, from under the eastern gallery. Photos by David Iliff (detail), 9 March 2015. Source: Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Credit: Howard Hotson (December 2018)