The Medieval Library.

A Writer With His Desk and Table
From a MS of Le Livre des Propriétés des Choses, in the British Museum.

entrance to the main library is by a winding staircase just at the angle where they pass into the second quadrangle from the first. Pausing here, the guide would point out the row of openings into the writing-rooms, which occupy the whole ground floor of the library side of the quadrangle, some serving as special studies for those monks who are themselves composing books, and some as copy-ing rooms for the scribes who are multiplying books for the library by copying manuscripts borrowed from neighboring institutions.

Up the winding stair the visitor would find a noble hall occupying the whole of the upper story. Extending as it does above the cloister walk to the very garth, it is beautifully lighted both from the court and from the outside. The windows are large and almost continuous, and, the width not being over a dozen yards, the long narrow room is perfectly lighted. This room, three times as long, perhaps, as it is wide, is divided near one end into two unequal parts by an iron grille. The larger of these parts is filled with slightly sloping desks, having books chained on them, and perhaps a row of books standing, backs inward, along the top, or even two or three rows above or below the shelf of the desk. The smaller part of the room is furnished with presses like those in church and cloister, containing on the one hand those books too precious for exposure in the reading-room, and on the other a circulating collection.

The desks with chained books in the larger division are arranged running continuously from side to side clear across the hall, save for an aisle in the center and narrow passages along each wall of the room. Between the long rows is just space enough for the readers and no more, the back of each desk forming at the same time the back of the reader's seat of the next row, if they are arranged for sitting, and just about as close if they are for standing. In this arrangement the visitor recognizes the embryo of the familiar modern stack system of arranging books, as he recognizes in the almeries of presses of the smaller portion of the room the predecessors of the modern wall bookcase.

At this point the visitor might find by appointment the librarian, who, thanks to this visit would be apt to have had the coveted invitation to dine at the better-spread strangers' table, and would be quite content to postpone his thin meal at commons for a better one a little later. He would show the visitor the curious devices for fastening the rods to which the book chains are attached by sliding rings, so that they may be securely fastened and yet the librarian