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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector |
Public Record Office The crenelated battlements of the Tower of London, which appear in this issue's bookplate, may help to remind us of the importance of archives in the history of libraries. They also remind us of the world's great repositories of archival material, the Public Record Office of Great Britain. The Public Record Office had its beginnings in 1838, when an Act of Parliament was passed setting it up. The act was designed to correct abuses of long standing which had resulted from the fact that official records had been stored in scattered locations under diffuse responsibility. These circumstances had, over several centuries, resulted in the loss of many valuable records. Indeed, horror stories are told of governmental offices selling their "waste" papers to merchants for use as wrapping material and of last-minute rescues of priceless medieval documents about to be used for transporting cheese. Such circumstances were not limited to Great Britain, however. Systematic concern for the preservation of public records is largely a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The history of Britain's archives begins primarily with William the Conqueror, whose reign produced one of the treasures of the PRO, indeed one of the treasures of medieval history, the Domesday Book. Many of the daily administrative records of this period are preserved as well. In addition to the Tower, which was not in use as a repository by 1305, records were located in such places as Westminster, Whitehall, Carleton Ride, and the King's Mews. The State Paper Office at Whitehall was an especially important repository, having been established by Henry VIII. It held papers relating to State and Council; the Tower records seem to have been generally centered around financial matters. The story of the growth of the PRO parallels that of archives in other countries. As the comprehension of its usefulness grew through the nineteenth century, it obtained authority over a wider range of public documents and also received the authorization to decide which documents were to be preserved and which discarded. Finally, the PRO was the subject of a thorough statutory reorganization and modernization in 1959. It has recently transferred part of its holdings to a new facility in Kew, Surrey, in addition to its original location in Chancery Lane, London. Our bookplate belonged to a predecessor of the Public Records Office, the Keeper of the Records, who had his quarters in the Tower. The bookplate is interesting in its own right as well, as it represents one of the very earliest examples of a "view" plate, or one depicting a real scene, as opposed to, let us say, a coat of arms, portrait, or allegorical tableau. The present example is a copperplate engraving from around 1770, done by J. Mynde, who produced several other bookplates and portraits in London. For some reason library historians have not devoted the attention to archives, especially their more recent development, which they would seem to deserve. The earliest institutions we call libraries contained material largely of an archival nature. In recent times archivists' methods have become differentiated from those of librarians, but the purposes of both types of institutions have remained the same: the preservation and transmission of knowledge. An archive may possess the size and richness of the Public Record Office, or it may consist of the past hundred years' records in a county courthouse. Whatever the scope, it should be apparent that it is an integral part of library history. Philip A. Metzger Graduate
School of Library and Information Science The
University of Texas at Austin
[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 12, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 285-286.] |
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