While marginal scribblings and bookmarks invite us to gauge how readers interacted with their books, this chapter (and the next) turn to another dimension of the medieval reading experience: book repositories. Libraries provide their own view on the practices of reading in the Middle Ages. If we could wander around a medieval library, we would learn a lot about how, precisely, books were consulted and how they were stored. Imagine looking over the shoulders of readers and the earliest curators of manuscripts! However, since very few medieval libraries survive in their original state, such information needs to be deduced from other evidence, for example, from the logistical information placed in books by librarians. Here we explore one of these: the “call number” or pressmark.

The present chapter addresses a seemingly simple question: how did a reader find a specific manuscript in a space that held perhaps several hundred of these objects? So how did medieval readers locate books, especially when they owned many of them? The answer lies in a neat trick that resembles our modern GPS: a book was tagged with a unique identifier (a pressmark) that was entered into a searchable database (a library catalogue), which could subsequently be consulted with a handheld device (a portable version of the catalogue).

Shelfmarks

The most effective tool for retrieving a book in the medieval library was to give it a number and place it in the correct sequential order on the shelf. It is still common practice in modern libraries and for good reason: as long as the book is put back in the right spot, you are able to find it again quickly. Such book numbers—shelfmarks or pressmarks—come in various formats. The more books a library owned, the more complex the pressmarks became (had to become, actually). The simplest type merely stated that the book in question was the twelfth volume in the cupboard, as seen in the opening of the manuscript shown in Figure 75.

Similarly, in small collections books were marked with single letters. In Bethlehem Priory near Brussels, each item in the small library of Middle Dutch books was given a letter, which was placed on an empty page in front of the manuscript together with a short title.