Once upon a time, around 150 BCE, there were two great kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean that each possessed a marvelous treasure: one of the two greatest libraries of the age.  The first kingdom, possessing more wealth, power, and lineage, was the Ptolemy V’s Egyptian realm, home to the legendary Library of Alexandria.  The other was the upstart Attalid dynasty’s land of Pergamum, located on the eastern coast of today’s Turkey.  The dynasty’s founder, Attalus I, established his capital at the port of Ephesus, and when his book-loving son, Eumenes II, assumed the throne, he decided to create a library there that would rival Alexandria’s.  Ptolemy’s reaction was an embargo on shipping papyrus (needed for scrolls) to Pergamum.  Eumenes ordered the mass-production of animal skins smooth enough to write on, and this more durable medium became popular throughout the ancient world and known as parchment, a corruption of Pergamum.  Eumenes also forged strong political and military ties with Rome.  Eumenes’ loyalty to Rome paid off as they ceded to Pergamum a number of nearby minor kingdoms, and he became filthy rich and spent a lot of it on his library.

            The Alexandrian Library set the benchmark for rapacious book collecting, but Eumenes and his little brother, Attalus II, were close and eventually acquired over 200,000 scrolls, by hook or, very often, by crook.  The new library attracted many leading scholars, including Crates of Mallus, a noted grammarian who became the head of the Pergamum Library and created the first known globe of Earth.  At one point Eumenes made Crates his ambassador to Rome where he fell into an open sewer and broke his leg.  His recovery in Rome took months and during his convalescence he gave daily lectures on grammar, being a famous grammarian, and, according to that most readable of Roman historians, Suetonius, Crates became “the first to introduce the study of grammar into our city.”

            “In the Greco-Roman world,” Wikipedia tells us, once a boy had learned basic Greek and Latin, the grammarian’s job was teaching the correct way of speaking.   Grammarians were B-list philosophers, and while “some grammarians went on to achieve elevated positions in Rome …  few enjoyed financial success.”  Nonetheless, they taught topics such as literature, etymologies, and “accurate reading aloud.”  The same source says that “Before the reintroduction of separated text (spaces between words) in the Late Middle Ages, the ability to read silently was considered rather remarkable.”  The article also notes that “In 18th-century Europe, the then new practice of reading alone in bed was, for a time, considered dangerous and immoral,” especially by women, since they “could escape familial and communal obligations and transgress moral boundaries through the private fantasy worlds in books.”  Now, there’s an effective argument for pleasure reading.  

            All libraries are treasure troves to some extent, and our local Noel Wien Library is richer than most, thanks to some remarkable Fairbanksans.  Barbara and Dan Gorman donated over 70,000 rare and first edition books to the Library Foundation, the sale of which became the nonprofit’s original source of funding for a multitude of enhancements to our library.  Artist Claire Fejes noted that when Noel Wien Library was built in 1977 there was no local museum, and she spearheaded a fundraising effort that purchased a bevy of original artwork for the aesthetic stimulation and enjoyment of the thousands of people who visit the library every week.  And Dr. Keith Gianni donated a cornucopia of important Alaskana artwork that fill Noel Wien and North Pole Libraries. 

            One of the principal treasures of any library are the librarians that make them go.  The prime duties of librarians have remained unchanged for 5,000 years – since writing was invented and someone was needed to collect and organize those writings and protect and get them to those with approved access.  From clay tablets to online tablets, the responsibilities are still the same, and some library treasures require special care.  That’s when Nick Wilding has proven helpful.  Wilding is a professor of the history of science and history of the book at Georgia State University, as well as a renowned expert on both Galileo and detecting forgeries.  So, when Pablo Alvarez, a librarian at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan Library, got an email from Wilding, his heart sank.  The most prized item in Alvarez’s library,  according to “The Document Detective,” a GSU Magazine article, is “Galileo’s presumed draft of a letter, along with sketches of the moons of Jupiter, that are linked to his historic epiphany –that the planets of our solar system orbit the Sun.”

            The letter had been authenticated by three previous Galileo experts, but “ ‘The document was supposed to be a draft,’ Wilding says, ‘but in this draft, Galileo had on his Sunday best — a formal hand. At that time in Europe, most people had different styles of handwriting to suit different purposes.’  There were other anomalies that only an ardent scholar of the astronomer, already intimate with every quirk of his writing styles, would see. That includes Galileo’s habit of letting the crossbow of a ‘t’ dip into the letter ‘e’ if it followed (absent in the library document), or the fact that one batch of ink had been used for observations that were nearly six months apart. Even the quill, to Wilding’s eye, seemed wrong – ‘broad and cut to a chisel tip, a quill that Galileo never used’.” 

In researching the GSU document, Wilding found that the Morgan Library in New York City also possessed a forgery by the same forger, a notorious Italian named Tobia Nicotra.  In 1928 Nicotra conned the Library of Congress into buying a fake manuscript by Mozart, and a year later he wrote a biography of the composer Arturo Toscanini “that became better known for its fictions than its facts,” according to a NYTimes article, “Galileo Forgery’s Trail Leads to Web of Mistresses and Manuscripts.” “And in 1934 he was convicted of forgery in Milan after the police were tipped off by Toscanini’s son Walter, who had bought a fake Mozart from him ….. When the police raided Nicotra’s apartment in Milan … they found a virtual forgery factory, strewn with counterfeit documents that appeared to bear the signatures of Columbus, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Warren G. Harding and other famous figures.  Investigators had also found a sort of shrine to his seven mistresses.”  Nicotra admitted, “I did it to support my seven loves.”  His wife wasn’t enshrined.

Wilding’s hardly the only librarian detective; reference librarians are detectives by virtue of their job descriptions.  Working at the reference desk and fielding questions that could include anything in the universe was my favorite part of librarying.  Among the most challenging requests were for books whose titles and authors the patrons had forgotten, like a Fairbanks patron who could only describe the books she wanted as green. About six by nine inches big, and fictional.  We found it in 20 minutes using techniques described in “Finding a Book When You’ve Forgotten Its Title,” a New York Public Library article that maps out helpful strategies. “First, pin down everything you can remember about the book, plot, character names, time period in which the book may have been published, genre, etc. All these details are clues in identifying the title and author of the book. Online resources can help with your search for a half-remembered book, even if all you have is a basic plot line. Searching yourself is a good place to start; then, you can post to a listserv or discussion forum, where someone might recognize it …. Try Google! Type in everything you can remember about the book — as in, ‘picture book, rabbi, animals, advice, Yiddish — and scroll through the results. (That’s a real-life example of a book a patron was asking for: ‘It Could Always Be Worse’ by Margot Zemach).” Also, “You can also try googling one key detail you remember from a book” or try crowd-sourcing, like the Goodreads Group’s “What’s the Name of That Book?”

Speaking of crack librarians, there’s a team of them working as library associates in our public elementary schools.  Like so many in the teaching profession and the secondary school libraries, they’re laboring under intense and ever-increasing pressures as mandated but unfunded reading initiatives are introduced, staff shortages abound reacclimating students unused to socialization and reading due to the Covid pandemic, and book banners.  Despite all this, they strive to awaken our kids to the pleasures and benefits of reading and show them how to use libraries.  They are unsung heroes.  As author Sarah McIntyre put it, “A trained librarian is a powerful search engine with a heart.”