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Burning the Books A History of the Deliberate
Destruction of Knowledge 1st Edition Richard Ovenden.
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Richard Ovenden.
ISBN(s): 9780674241206, 0674241207
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.85 MB
Year: 2020
Language: english
Burning the Books
 Burning the Books
A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

R I C H A R D OV E N D E N

the belknap press of ha rva rd university press

ca m br idge, m assach uset ts
2020
 Copyright © Richard Ovenden, 2020
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America

First published in Great Britain as Burning the Books: A History of

Knowledge Under Attack in 2020 by John Murray (Publishers)
A Hachette UK company

First Harvard University Press edition, 2020

Typeset in Bembo MT Pro by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available

from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-674-24120-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

For Lyn
 Contents

Introduction 3

1. Cracked Clay Under the Mounds 17

2. A Pyre of Papyrus 29
3. When Books Were Dog Cheap 47
4. An Ark to Save Learning 65
5. Spoil of the Conqueror 79
6. How to Disobey Kafka 93
7. The Twice-­Burned Library 107
8. The Paper Brigade 119
9. To Be Burned Unread 141
10. Sarajevo Mon Amour 153
11. Flames of Empire 169
12. An Obsession with Archives 183
13. The Digital Deluge 197
14. Paradise Lost? 217
15. Coda: Why We Will Always Need Libraries
and Archives 225

Acknowledgements235
Picture Credits239
Notes241
Bibliography263
Index291
‘Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end,
burn human beings.’
Heinrich Heine, 1823

‘Those who do not remember the past are doomed to

repeat it.’
George Santayana, 1905
Nazi book-burnings in Berlin, 10 May 1933.
 Introduction

I n Berlin, on 10 May 1933, a bonfire was held on Unter den

Linden, the capital’s most important thoroughfare. It was a site
of great symbolic resonance: opposite the university and adjacent
to St Hedwig’s Cathedral, the Berlin State Opera House, the Royal
Palace and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s beautiful war memorial.
Watched by a cheering crowd of almost forty thousand a group of
students ceremonially marched up to the bonfire carrying the bust
of a Jewish intellectual, Magnus Hirschfeld (founder of the ground-­
breaking Institute of Sexual Sciences). Chanting the ‘Feuersprüche’,
a series of fire incantations, they threw the bust on top of thousands
of volumes from the institute’s library, which had joined books by
Jewish and other ‘un-­German’ writers (gays and communists prom-
inent among them) that had been seized from bookshops and
libraries. Around the fire stood rows of young men in Nazi uniforms
giving the Heil Hitler salute. The students were keen to curry
favour with the new government and this book-­ burning was a
carefully planned publicity stunt. In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s
1

new minister of propaganda, gave a rousing speech that was widely

reported around the world:
No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality
in family and state! . . . The future German man will not just be a
man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want
to educate you . . . You do well to commit to the flames the evil
spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed.

Similar scenes went on in ninety other locations across the country

that night. Although many libraries and archives in Germany were
left untouched, the bonfires were a clear warning sign of the attack
on knowledge about to be unleashed by the Nazi regime.
*
 burning the books

Knowledge is still under attack. Organised bodies of knowledge are

being attacked today, as they have been attacked throughout history.
Over time society has entrusted the preservation of knowledge to
libraries and archives, but today these institutions are facing multiple
threats. They are targets for individuals, groups, and even states
motivated to deny the truth and eradicate the past. At the same
time, libraries and archives are experiencing declining levels of
funding. This continued decline in resources has combined with the
growth of technology companies, which have effectively privatised
the storage and transmission of knowledge in digital form, taking
some of the functions of publicly funded libraries and archives into
the commercial realm. These companies are driven by very different
motives from the institutions that have traditionally made knowledge
available for society. When companies like Google have digitised
billions of pages of books and made them available online, and when
free online storage is provided by firms like Flickr, what is the point
of libraries?
Just at the time that public funding is under extreme pressure we
find that democratic institutions, the rule of law and open society
are also under threat. The truth itself is under attack. This is, of
course, no new thing. George Orwell pointed this out in Nineteen
Eighty-­Four, and his words ring disconcertingly true today as we
think about the role that libraries and archives must play in defence
of open societies: ‘There was truth, and there was untruth, and if
you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not
mad.’2 Libraries and archives have become central to the support of
democracy, the rule of law and open society as they are bodies that
exist to ‘cling to the truth’.
The notion that there could exist ‘alternative facts’ was famously
suggested by Kellyanne Conway, US Counselor to the President,
in January 2017. She was responding to criticism of Trump’s
assertion that the crowd that had attended his inauguration cere-
mony was larger than the crowd at Barack Obama’s five years
before, when images and data showed the opposite to have been
the case.3 It was a timely reminder that the preservation of infor-
mation continues to be a key tool in the defence of open
societies. Defending the truth against the rise of ‘alternative facts’
means capturing those truths, and the statements that deny them,

4
 introduction

so that we have reference points that societies can trust and rely
on.
Libraries are crucial for the healthy functioning of society. While
I have worked in libraries for more than thirty-­five years, I have
been a user of them far longer, and have seen the value they bring.
This book has been motivated by my own sense of anger at recent
failures across the globe – both deliberate and accidental – to ensure
that society can rely on libraries and archives to preserve knowledge.
The repeated attacks on them over the centuries need to be exam-
ined as a worrying trend in human history and the astonishing
efforts made by people to protect the knowledge they hold should
be celebrated.
The revelation that landing cards documenting the arrival into
the UK of the ‘Windrush generation’ had been deliberately destroyed
by the Home Office in 2010 shows the importance of archives. The
government had also begun to pursue a ‘hostile environment’ policy
on immigration, which required the Windrush migrants to prove
their continued residence here or be deported.4 Yet they had been
guaranteed citizenship under the British Nationality Act 1948 and
had come in good faith to the UK, which faced severe labour
shortages after the Second World War. By spring 2018, the Home
Office had admitted to the wrongful deportation of at least eighty-­
three of these citizens, eleven of whom had since died, prompting
a public outcry.
I was struck by the absurdity of a policy, instigated and aggres-
sively promulgated by a government department (under the
leadership of Theresa May, who had become prime minister by the
time the situation came to light) that had destroyed the main evidence
that would have enabled many of the people to prove their citizen-
ship.5 Although the decision to destroy the records was made before
the implementation of the policy and was probably not malicious,
the Home Office’s motivation to persist with the hostile treatment
may have been. I wrote an op-­ed in the Financial Times 6 pointing
out that the preservation of knowledge of this kind was vital for
an open, healthy society, as indeed it has been since the beginning
of our civilisations.
For as long as humans have gathered together in organised
communities, with a need to communicate with one another,

5
 burning the books

knowledge has been created and information recorded. In the

earliest communities, this took the form, as far as we know, of oral
information, and the only permanent record that survives is in the
form of images: paintings made on the walls of caves, or the
scratches of symbols on stones. We know nothing of the motivation
behind these marks; anthropologists and archaeologists can only
make educated guesses.
By the Bronze Age, communities were becoming better organ-
ised and more sophisticated. As groups of nomads settled, and began
to establish fixed communities, involved in farming and early
industry, they also began to develop hierarchies of organisation, with
governing families, tribal chiefs and others who led the rest of the
community.
These communities, from around 3,000 bce onwards, began to
keep written records. From these earliest archives, and in the docu-
ments found in them, we know a surprising amount of detail about
how those societies operated.7 In other documents people began to
record their thoughts, ideas, observations and stories. These were
preserved in the earliest libraries. This process of organising know­
ledge soon required the development of specialised skills, which
included the recording of knowledge and techniques for copying.
Over time these tasks resulted in the creation of professional roles
– loosely similar to those of the librarian or archivist. ‘Librarian’
comes from the Latin word librarius, from liber meaning ‘book’. The
term ‘archivist’ is from the Latin archivum, which refers to both
written records and the place where they are kept. The origins of
this word derive from the Greek archeia meaning ‘public records’.
Libraries and archives were not created or run with the same motiv-
ation as those in the modern world, and it is dangerous to draw
analogies between these ancient collections and those of today. Even
so, these civilisations created bodies of knowledge and developed
skills to organise them, many of which we recognise today, such as
catalogues and metadata.8
The roles of librarian and archivist were often combined with
others, such as priest or administrator, becoming more distinct and
visible in ancient Greece and Rome, where libraries were more
publicly available, and the belief that access to knowledge is an
essential element of a healthy society began to take hold.9 A list of

6
 introduction

the names of the men who held the post of head librarian of the
Great Library of Alexandria during the third and second centuries
bce survives – many of these figures were also recognised as the
leading scholars of their time, such as Apollonius of Rhodes (whose
epic poem about Jason and the Golden Fleece inspired the Aeneid)
and Aristophanes of Byzantium (inventor of one of the earliest
forms of punctuation).10
Storehouses of knowledge have been at the heart of the devel-
opment of societies from their inception. Although the technologies
of creating knowledge, and the techniques for preservation have
altered radically, their core functions have changed surprisingly little.
Firstly, libraries and archives collect, organise and preserve know-
ledge. Through gift, transfer and purchase they have accumulated
tablets, scrolls, books, journals, manuscripts, photographs and many
other methods of documenting civilisation. Today these formats are
expanded through digital media, from word-­ processing files, to
emails, web pages and social media. In antiquity and the medieval
period the work of organising libraries had sacred connotations: the
archives of the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia were often kept
in temples, and King Philippe Auguste (also known as Philip II) of
France established the ‘Trésor des Chartes’ (the treasury of charters).
This was at first a ‘mobile’ collection, but by 1254 came to be stored
in a purpose-­built suite of rooms at the holy site of the Sainte-
Chapelle in Paris.11
Through developing and publishing their catalogues, providing
reading rooms, sponsoring scholarship, by publishing books, staging
exhibitions, and more recently through digitisation, libraries and
archives have been part of the broader history of disseminating ideas.
The creation of national libraries from the eighteenth century and
public libraries from the nineteenth century onwards massively
expanded the role that these institutions played in transforming
society.
At the heart of this is the idea of preservation. Knowledge can
be vulnerable, fragile and unstable. Papyrus, paper and parchment
are highly combustible. Water can just as easily damage them, as
can mould created through high humidity. Books and documents
can be stolen, defaced and tampered with. The existence of digital
files can be even more fleeting, owing to technological obsolescence,

7
 burning the books

the impermanence of magnetic storage media, and the vulnerability

of all knowledge placed online. As anyone who has encountered a
broken web link has discovered, there can be no access without
preservation.
Archives are different from libraries. Libraries are accumulations
of knowledge, built up one book at a time, often with great strategic
purpose, while archives document directly the actions and decision-­
making processes of institutions and administrations, even of
governments. Libraries often hold some of this material as well – the
printed Journal of the House of Commons, for example – but archives
are by their nature full of material, often mundane in its character,
not intended to be read by a mass audience. But where libraries
deal with ideas, ambitions, discoveries and imaginings, archives detail
the routine but vital stuff of everyday life: land ownership, imports
and exports, the minutes of committees and taxes. Lists are often
an important feature: whether they are lists of citizens recorded in
a census, or lists of immigrants arriving on a boat, archives are at
the heart of history, recording the implementation of the ideas and
thoughts that may be captured in a book.
The flip side of this, of course, is that the significance of books
and archival material is recognised not only by those who wish
to protect knowledge, but also by those who wish to destroy it.
Throughout history, libraries and archives have been subject to
attack. At times librarians and archivists have risked and lost their
lives for the preservation of knowledge.
I want to explore a number of key episodes from history to
highlight different motivations for the destruction of the storehouses
of knowledge, and the responses developed by the profession to
resist it. The individual cases that I focus on (and I could have
chosen dozens of others) tell us something about the period in
which the events took place and are fascinating in their own right.
The motivations of states that continue to erase history will be
considered in the context of archives. As knowledge is increasingly
created in digital form, the challenges that this reality poses for the
preservation of knowledge and for the health of open societies will
be examined. The book will end with some suggestions for how
libraries and archives could be better supported in their current
political and financial contexts, and as a Coda I will suggest five

8
 introduction

functions that these institutions have for society, to highlight their

value, for the benefit of those in positions of power.
Libraries and archives themselves destroy knowledge daily.
Duplicate books are routinely disposed of when only one copy is
needed. Smaller libraries are often subsumed into a bigger unit, a
process that usually results in the knowledge being maintained by
the bigger library but sometimes, by accident or design, unique
materials are lost. Archives are designed around a process called
appraisal, a system of disposal and retention. Not everything can
or should be kept. Although this can sometimes seem outrageous
and incomprehensible to historians, the idea that every document
should be kept is economically unsustainable. Much of what is
destroyed in such processes is information that is already held
elsewhere.
The processes of selection, acquisition and cataloguing, as well
as of disposal and retention, are never neutral acts. They are done
by human beings, working in their social and temporal contexts.
The books and journals that sit on library shelves today, or are
made available through our digital libraries, or the documents and
ledgers that are in our archives, are there because of human agency.
The past behaviour of humans involved in the creation of collec-
tions was, therefore, subject to bias, prejudice and personality.
Most libraries and archives have great omissions in their collections,
‘silences’ that have often severely limited how the historical record
treats, for example, people of colour, or women. Anyone using
those collections today must be aware of those contexts. Readers
of this book are similarly encouraged to bear these historical
contexts in mind and to remember that in the past people did
things differently.
In examining the history of libraries and the way their collections
have evolved over time we are, in many ways, telling the story of
the survival of knowledge itself. Every individual book that exists
now in these institutions, all the collections that together build up
into larger bodies of knowledge, are survivors.
Until the advent of digital information, libraries and archives had
well-­developed strategies for preserving their collections: paper. The
institutions shared the responsibility with their readers. All new users
of the Bodleian, for example, are still required to formally swear

9
 burning the books

‘not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame’,
as they have done for over four hundred years. Stable levels of
temperature and relative humidity, avoidance of flood and fire, and
well-­organised shelving were at the heart of preservation strategies.
Digital information is inherently less stable and requires a much
more proactive approach, not just to the technology itself (such as
file formats, operating systems and software). These challenges have
been amplified by the widespread adoption of online services
provided by major technology companies, especially those in the
world of social media, for whom preservation of knowledge is a
purely commercial consideration.
As more and more of the world’s memory is placed online we
are effectively outsourcing that memory to the major technology
companies that now control the internet. The phrase ‘Look it up’
used to mean searching in the index of a printed book, or going
to the right alphabetical entry in an encyclopaedia or dictionary.
Now it just means typing a word, term or question into a search
box, and letting the computer do the rest. Society used to value
the training of personal memory, even devising sophisticated exer-
cises for improving the act of memorising. Those days are gone.
There are dangers in the convenience of the internet, however, as
the control exercised by the major technology companies over our
digital memory is huge. Some organisations, including libraries
and archives, are now trying hard to take back control through
independently preserving websites, blog posts, social media, even
email and other personal digital collections.
‘We are drowning in information, but are starved of knowledge,’
John Naisbitt pointed out as early as 1982 in his book Megatrends.12
A concept of ‘digital abundance’ has since been coined to help
understand one important aspect of the digital world, one which
my daily life as a librarian brings me to consider often.13 The amount
of digital information available to any user with a computer and an
internet connection is overwhelmingly large, too large to be able
to comprehend. Librarians and archivists are now deeply con-
cerned with how to search effectively across the mass of available
knowledge.14
The digital world is full of dichotomies. On the one hand the
creation of knowledge has never been easier, nor has it been easier

10
 introduction

to copy texts, images and other forms of information. Storage of

digital information on a vast scale is now not only possible but
surprisingly inexpensive. Yet storage is not the same thing as pres-
ervation. The knowledge stored by online platforms is at risk of
being lost, as digital information is surprisingly vulnerable to both
neglect as well as deliberate destruction. There is also the problem
that the knowledge we create through our daily interactions is
invisible to most of us, but it can be manipulated and used against
society for commercial and political gain. Having it destroyed may
be a desirable short-­term outcome for many people worried about
invasions of privacy but this might ultimately be to the detriment
of society.
I am lucky enough to work in one of the world’s greatest libraries.
Formally founded in 1598, and first opened to readers in 1602, the
Bodleian in Oxford has enjoyed a continuous existence ever since.
Working in an institution like this I am constantly aware of the
achievements of past librarians. The Bodleian today has well over
13 million printed volumes in its collection, plus miles and miles
of manuscripts and archives. It has built up a broad collection
including millions of maps, music scores, photographs, ephemera
and a myriad other things. This includes petabytes worth of digital
information such as journals, datasets, images, texts, emails. The
collections are housed in forty buildings dating from the fifteenth
to the twenty-­ first century, which have a fascinating history in
themselves.
The Bodleian’s collection includes the First Folio of Shakespeare
(1623), the Gutenberg Bible (c.1450), as well as manuscripts and
documents from around the world – the late Ming Period Selden
Map of China, or the illuminated masterpiece the Romance of
Alexander from the fourteenth century, for example. These items
have fascin­ating histories that tell the story of how they have passed
through time and now sit on the shelves of the Bodleian. The
Bodleian is in fact really a collection of collections, and the stories
of how these collections came to be in the Bodleian have helped
to build its fame over the past four hundred years.15
My own education, up to the age of eighteen, was transformed
by being able to use my home town of Deal’s public library. In that
building I discovered the joys of reading. At first this was escape

11
 burning the books

through science fiction (especially Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss and

Ursula K. Le Guin), and then I read Thomas Hardy and D. H.
Lawrence, but also authors from beyond Britain: Hermann Hesse,
Gogol, Colette and many more. I found I could borrow vinyl
records and discovered there was more to classical music than
Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture: Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, Mozart.
I could read the ‘serious’ newspapers and the Times Literary
Supplement. All for free – crucially important as my family were not
wealthy and there was little money to buy books.
The library was (and is) run by local government, free for users
of the majority of its services, and funded from local taxation under
legal provisions that were first set out by the Public Libraries Act
of 1850. There was political opposition to the idea at the time. As
the bill worked its way through Parliament, the Conservative MP
Colonel Sibthorp was sceptical of the importance of reading to the
working classes, on the grounds that he himself ‘did not like reading
at all and had hated it while at Oxford’.16
The system of public libraries that the Act inaugurated replaced
a patchwork of endowed libraries, parish libraries, collections in
coffee houses, fishermen’s reading rooms as well as subscription
libraries and book clubs, which were products of the ‘age of improve-
ment’ and the concept of ‘useful knowledge’. This term grew out
of the ferment of ideas in the eighteenth century. The American
Philosophical Society was started by a group of prominent individ-
uals, including Benjamin Franklin, in 1767, for ‘promoting useful
knowledge’. In 1799, the Royal Institution was founded ‘for diffusing
the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful
mechanical inventions and improvements’. Both organisations had
libraries to support their work.
Libraries were a key part of a wider movement to broaden
education, for the benefit of the individual, but also for society as
a whole. A century or more later Sylvia Pankhurst, the inspirational
champion of women’s rights, wrote to the director of the British
Museum requesting admission to the Reading Room of the library:
‘as I desire to consult various government publications and other
works to which I cannot obtain access in any other way.’ At the
foot of her letter of application she cited her object of study: ‘to
obtain information on the employment of women’.17

12
 introduction

The Public Libraries Act made it possible for local authorities

to institute public libraries and pay for them through ‘rates’ (as
local taxation was then called), but this system was entirely volun-
tary. It was not until 1964 that the Public Libraries and Museums
Act made it a duty for local authorities to provide libraries, and
the system retains a strong place in the general consciousness today
as a cherished service, part of the national infrastructure for public
education.18
Despite this, public libraries in the UK have borne the brunt of
the pressure that successive governments have placed on budgets
available to local authorities.19 Local authorities have had to make
very tough decisions on how to manage, many of them targeting
libraries and county record offices. As of 2018/19 there are 3,583
public libraries in the UK compared with 4,356 in 2009/10: 773
have closed. Libraries in many communities have also come to
depend increasingly on volunteers to remain open as the number
of people employed in the sector fell to less than 16,000.20
The preservation of knowledge is a critical struggle all over the
world. In South Africa, following the collapse of the apartheid
regime, the approach taken to help heal a society, riven by the
violence and oppression of the previous century, was to ‘faithfully
record the pain of the past so that a unified nation can call upon
that past as a galvanising force in the large tasks of reconstruction’.21
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established as a way
of ‘addressing their difficult past’.22 The commission was there to
support the transitioning of society in a peaceful way, while at the
same time coming to terms with – and confronting – the recent
history and its impact on society and on individual citizens. There
were political and legal aspects to the commission, but also histor-
ical, moral and psychological aims; one of the aims in the Promotion
of National Unity and Reconciliation Act was to establish ‘as
complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of
gross violations of human rights’. This was undertaken in partner-
ship with the National Archives of South Africa, whose staff were
intimately involved in ensuring that the past could be properly
addressed, and the record would be available for people. However,
the emphasis in South Africa was not to open up state archives to
encounter the ‘nature, causes and extent’ of what had gone wrong,

13
 burning the books

as has been the case in East Germany following the collapse of

communism in 1989, but rather on the hearings themselves, where
the testimonies created a deep oral history, which has formed a new
archive.
Officials in South Africa’s apartheid regime destroyed documents
on a massive scale. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was
hampered all along by this; in their final report they devoted an
entire section to the destruction of records. They put it bluntly:
‘The story of apartheid is, amongst other things, the story of the
systematic elimination of thousands of voices that should have been
part of the nation’s memory.’ The report placed blame on the
government: ‘The tragedy is that the former government deliberately
and systematically destroyed a huge body of state records and docu-
mentation in an attempt to remove incriminating evidence and
thereby sanitise the history of oppressive rule.’ The destruction
highlighted the critical role that these records played: ‘the mass
destruction of records . . . has had a severe impact on South Africa’s
social memory. Swathes of official documentary memory, particularly
around the inner workings of the apartheid state’s security apparatus,
have been obliterated.’23 In Iraq, as we shall see in chapter 12, many
of the key records were not destroyed but removed to the United
States, where some still remain. Their return could form part of
another process of national ‘truth and reconciliation’ in that country
so ravaged by civil war.
Libraries and archives share the responsibility of preserving know­
ledge for society. This book has been written not just to highlight
the destruction of those institutions in the past, but also to acknow-
ledge and celebrate the ways librarians and archivists have fought
back. It is through their work that knowledge has passed down
from one generation to the next, preserved so that people and
society can develop and seek inspiration from that knowledge.
In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread
of knowledge to the way one candle is lit from another: ‘He who
receives an idea from me’, wrote Jefferson, ‘receives instruction
himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine,
receives light without darkening me.’24 Libraries and archives are
institutions that fulfil the promise of Jefferson’s taper – an essential
point of reference for ideas, facts and truth. The history of how

14
 introduction

they have faced the challenges of securing the flame of knowledge

and making it possible to enlighten others is complex.
Individual stories in this book are instructive of the many ways
knowledge has been attacked throughout history. Jefferson’s taper
remains alight today thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the
preservers of knowledge: collectors, scholars, writers, and especially
the librarians and archivists who are the other half of this story.

15
 burning the books

Austen Henry Layard sketching at Nimrud.

16
 cracked clay under the mounds

1
Cracked Clay Under the Mounds

T he ancient Greek general and historian Xenophon, writing

in his most famous work, the Anabasis or Persian Expedition,
recounted the dramatic story of how he led a stranded army of
10,000 Greek mercenaries out of Mesopotamia and back to Greece.
Xenophon described the army passing through the centre of what
is now Iraq and pausing at a spot on the banks of the River Tigris,
at a place he referred to as Larisa.1 Surveying the landscape,
Xenophon noted an immense deserted city with towering walls.
From here they marched further along to another city, Mespila, that
Xenophon states ‘was once inhabited by the Medes’. It was here,
according to Xenophon, that Medea, the king’s wife, had sought
refuge while the Persians were besieging their empire. The Persian
king was unable to take the city, Xenophon reports, until Zeus
‘rendered the inhabitants thunderstruck’.2
What Xenophon was looking at, in this ancient landscape, was
the remains of the cities of Nimrud (Larisa) and Nineveh (Mespila).
These cities were at the heart of the great Assyrian Empire and
flourished under the rule of the famed and formidable King
Ashurbanipal. After Ashurbanipal’s death, Nineveh was destroyed
by an alliance of Babylonians, Medes and Scythians in 612 bce.
Xenophon confuses the Assyrians (who had inhabited the city) and
the Medes (who took it) with the Medes and the Persians, the
major eastern power at his time of writing.3
I find it astonishing to think that Xenophon viewed these great
mounds more than two millennia ago; that the ruins were already
many centuries old when he saw them, with the events that destroyed
the cities already obscure even to that great historian. The Greeks
saw themselves as the pioneers of libraries and by the time Xenophon
was writing the Greek world had a vibrant book culture, in which

17
 burning the books

libraries played an important part. Xenophon would surely have

been excited to have learned of the magnificent library preserved
deep in the soil below, that would one day reveal the story of its
ancient founder, Ashurbanipal.
It would take a further twenty-­two centuries before the great
library of Ashurbanipal would be discovered and the full history of
this empire (and of its predecessors and neighbours) could be unrav-
elled, both from archaeology of many Assyrian sites excavated since
but especially from the documents found in these digs.
Writing feels like such a recent technology in the long story of
humanity that it is tempting to assume our most ancient civilisations
relied primarily on oral communication to pass on knowledge.
These civilisations, centred around the area we know today as Turkey,
Syria, Iraq and Iran, left large and impressive physical remains –
buildings and objects above the ground and uncovered in
archaeological digs – but they also left behind documents that give
us clear evidence that the written record existed alongside oral
communication in the centuries before the civilisations of Egypt,
Mycenae, Persia, and eventually Greece and Rome. This written
record is highly revealing of these cultures. The peoples of Assyria
and their neighbouring civilisations had a well-­developed culture
of documentation and have passed down to us a rich intellectual
inheritance.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the lands that Xenophon
described at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries bce became
the subject of great interest to rival European imperial powers. This
interest was to help recover the cultures of knowledge developed
in these civilisations, revealing not only some of the earliest libraries
and archives on the planet, but also evidence of ancient attacks on
knowledge.
The British presence in this region was originally due to the
activities of that engine of imperial expansion, the East India
Company, which mixed trade with the enforcement of military and
diplomatic power. One of its key employees in the region was
Claudius James Rich, a talented connoisseur of oriental languages
and antiquities, considered by his contemporaries to be the most
powerful man in Baghdad, apart from the local Ottoman ruler, the
Pasha; ‘and some even questioned whether the Pasha himself would

18
 cracked clay under the mounds

not at any time shape his conduct according to Mr. Rich’s sugges-
tions and advice, rather than as his own council might wish’.4 In
pursuit of gratifying his ‘insatiable thirst for seeing new countries’,5
Rich had even managed to enter the Great Mosque at Damascus
in disguise, which would have been a tall order for a Western visitor
at the time.6 Rich travelled extensively throughout the region and
made detailed studies of its history and antiquities, building a collec-
tion of manuscripts, which were purchased by the British Museum
after his death. In 1820–1 Rich first visited the site of Nineveh,
and the great mound of Kouyunjik (as it was called in Ottoman
Turkish), which was at the heart of the Assyrian city. During this
visit, Rich unearthed a cuneiform tablet that had been preserved
from Ashurbanipal’s palace. This tablet was the first of tens of thou-
sands that would be discovered on the site.
Rich sold his collection of amateurishly excavated artefacts to
the British Museum, and the arrival of the first cuneiform tablets
in London triggered a flurry of excited interest in the region, and
speculation about what treasures might be in its soil. The collection
was seen in London by Julius Mohl, the secretary of the French
Asiatic Society, who also read Rich’s published accounts. Mohl
immediately encouraged the French government to send its own
expedition to Mesopotamia, so that they could compete with Britain
for the glory of French scholarship. A French scholar, Paul-­Émile
Botta, was dispatched to Mosul as consul, with enough funds to
make his own excavations, beginning in 1842. These were the first
serious excavations to be made in the area and their publication in
Paris in a sumptuously illustrated book, Monument de Ninive (1849),
furnished with illustrations by the artist Eugène Flandin, made them
famous among European elites. We do not know exactly where
and when, but its pages were at some point turned with a growing
sense of wonder by an adventurous young Briton named Austen
Henry Layard.
Layard grew up in Europe, in a wealthy family, and spent his
early years in Italy where he read avidly, being most strongly influ-
enced by the Arabian Nights.7 He developed a love for antiquities,
fine arts and travelling, and as soon as he was old enough he
embarked on extensive journeys across the Mediterranean, through
the Ottoman Empire, eventually visiting the country we now call

19
 burning the books

Iraq, at first with an older Englishman named Edward Mitford, and

then alone. Having reached the city of Mosul, Layard met Botta
who told him about his own discoveries in the mound of Kouyunjik,
and it may have been there that he saw a copy of the Monument de
Ninive.8 So Layard was inspired to begin digging, using a workforce
made up of local people that reached over a hundred and thirty at
its height, and despite scientific archaeology being in its infancy at
the time his efforts were astonishingly professional and productive.
Layard’s digs were at first financed privately by Stratford Canning,
the British ambassador in Constantinople, as the excavations became
an aspect of rivalry between France and Britain. Over just six years
a team of workers from local tribes were overseen and supported
by Hormuzd Rassam, a Chaldean Christian from Mosul, and brother
to the British vice consul. The two became close friends as well as
colleagues. From 1846 Rassam served as secretary and paymaster
for Layard’s digs, but he was also intellectually engaged with the
enterprise. Rassam’s role in these sensational excavations has received
less attention than it deserves, partly because he lacked the cunning
to promote himself with prompt publications on his findings and
partly because some of his successes were undermined by racist
detractors, and his final years were marred by legal disputes and
disillusionment. Rassam enabled Layard’s excavations to be a great
success through his organisational abilities, but he also contributed
to the interpretation of cuneiform, and after Layard returned to
Britain to pursue a political career, Rassam continued to oversee
major archaeological digs in Iraq, funded by the British Museum.9
As the digs progressed, they discovered enormous chambers filled
with clay tablets. Layard and his team had discovered not just frag-
ments of knowledge from the Assyrian Empire but the institution
at its very heart: the great library of Ashurbanipal. Some 28,000
tablets would be brought back to the British Museum; thousands
more are now in other institutions.10
Up to a foot high, clay tablets filled the chambers, some broken
into fragments but others miraculously preserved intact over
millennia. One chamber, ‘guarded by fish gods’, Layard wrote,
‘contained the decrees of the Assyrian kings as well as the archives
of the empire’.11 Many were historical records of wars, he surmised,
as ‘some seem to be Royal decrees, and are stamped with the name

20
 cracked clay under the mounds

of a king, the son of Essarhaddon; others again, divided into parallel

columns by horizontal lines, contain lists of the gods, and probably
a register of offerings made in their temples.’12 Particularly remark-
able were two fragmentary clay sealings, bearing the royal signets
of an Egyptian king, Shabaka, and an Assyrian monarch (probably
Sennacherib). Layard suggested they may have adorned a peace
treaty. Discoveries such as this would begin a process of grounding
legendary events in documentary evidence. Investigation into the
language, literature, beliefs and organisation of these ancient civil-
isations continues to this day.
I have been lucky enough to handle some Mesopotamian clay
tablets and see for myself the pioneering ways ancient communities
documented knowledge. I have examined a variety of clay tablets
preserved in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which show the
sophistication developed by these cultures. The first to come out
of the storage drawers in the museum were small oval tablets from
a site at Jemdet-­Nasr in southern Iraq. The tablets were highly
practical, their shape designed to fit easily in the palm of the hand.
Information was scratched into the clay while it was still moist. It
is likely that these tablets, which held administrative information
mostly about quantities of produce being traded (one tablet shows
an image of donkeys, preceded by the number seven, for example,
which referred to ‘seven donkeys’), would have been discarded after
use as they were found as fragments piled in a corner of a room.
Other tablets have been found as waste materials being used to
patch a wall or some other part of a building in need of repair.
Often throughout history records of this kind have only been
preserved by accident. Ancient Mesopotamia was no exception.
Far more exciting were the clay tablets that had not been discarded
but preserved and used again. I marvelled at slightly larger tablets,
which contained more densely packed inscriptions. These square
tablets are known as ‘library’ documents as they contain literary or
cultural texts on topics ranging from religion to astrology, and were
designed to be kept for reading over long periods. One of the
literary tablets even has a colophon, which is where the scribe
records the details of the document itself – what the text was, who
the scribe was, and where and when he worked (it was almost
always men who did the copying). These details, akin to the title

21
 burning the books

pages of modern books, show that the tablets were intended to be

kept with others, as the specific colophon helped to distinguish the
contents of one tablet from another. This is the earliest form of
metadata.
The surviving tablets show that there were other kinds of archival
documents too, records of administrative and bureaucratic activity.
A group of very small tablets, which looked a lot like the breakfast
cereal ‘shredded wheat’, were ‘messenger’ documents. They provided
proof of identity of a messenger who had come to either collect
or deliver goods of some kind. They were small because they needed
to be portable; they were kept by a messenger in a pocket or a bag
and handed over on arrival. It is unclear why these were kept and
not used for building repairs, but it may well have been for future
reference.
Thanks to almost two centuries of archaeology we now know
that these ancient peoples had a sophisticated culture, fostering
libraries, archives and scribes. As the earliest civilisations formed,
moving from nomadic to settled existence, so too did the sense that
a permanent record of communication and of storing knowledge
was required. When Ashurbanipal’s library was in operation, the
tablets used then – heavy and cumbersome – required chambers
such as those Layard discovered for storage so that copies could be
made or information retrieved. Over time, scholars have uncovered
evidence from the tablets of cataloguing and arrangement.
In 1846 Layard began to ship material back to Britain, and his
finds became an instant sensation when they were revealed in
London. Public pressure, fuelled by news reports, helped to change
the view of the board of the British Museum, which agreed to
fund further expeditions, partly spurred on by politicians who saw
the success of the excavations as a victory over their French rivals.
Layard became a national hero – nicknamed the ‘Lion of Nineveh’
– and was able to build a career as a writer and politician thanks
to his new-­found fame. The discovery of the library of Ashurbanipal
was perhaps his most important find. The sculptures, pottery, jewels
and the statuary (now on display in the great museums of London,
Berlin, New York and Paris) were aesthetically stunning, but deci-
phering the knowledge contained in the collections was to truly
transform our understanding of the ancient world.

22
 cracked clay under the mounds

From studying these excavated tablets, we now understand that

the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was perhaps the first attempt to
assemble under one roof the entire corpus of collectable knowledge
that could be assembled at the time. Ashurbanipal’s library consisted
of three main groups: literary and scholarly texts, oracular queries
and divination records, and letters, reports, census surveys, contracts
and other forms of administrative documentation. The mass of
material here (as in many of the other ancient libraries discovered
in Mesopotamia) concerned the prediction of the future. Ashurbanipal
wanted the knowledge in his library to help him decide when was
the best time to go to war, to get married, to have a child, to plant
a crop, or to do any of the essential things in life. Libraries were
necessary for the future because of the knowledge they collected
from the past, to put into the hands of the decision-­makers, the
most important decision-­maker in Nineveh being Ashurbanipal.13
The literary texts embraced a wide range of subjects from the
religious, medical and magical, to the historical and mythological,
and were highly organised, arranged in a subject sequence with tags
attached to them, which we might today regard as catalogue records
or even as metadata. These were kept as a permanent reference
resource, whereas the archival materials were retained on a more
temporary basis as a means of settling legal disputes over land and
property.14 Among the most important discoveries made by Layard
and Rassam at Nineveh were a series of tablets that contain the
text of one of the world’s earliest surviving works of literature, the
Epic of Gilgamesh. Several different series of tablets were found at
Nineveh showing the ownership of this same key text over multiple
generations, all preserved together, passed down from one gener-
ation of kings to the next, even with a colophon claiming it was
written in Ashurbanipal’s own hand.
From the archaeological finds of the contents of Mesopotamian
archives and libraries, and from the study of the texts on the tablets
unearthed, we can identify a distinct tradition of organising know­
ledge and even the identities of professionals with responsibilities
for these collections. Unlike today, where the professional roles of
archivist and librarian are quite distinct, these lines are less easy
to observe in ancient communities. Libraries such as Ashurbanipal’s
reveal a desire to manage information and also give us a sense of

23
 burning the books

how valuable knowledge was to rulers and how they were deter-
mined to acquire it by any means.
The scholarship of the last forty years on the Royal Library of
Ashurbanipal has determined that it was built up not just by scribal
copying but also by taking knowledge from neighbouring states.
Our understanding of this comes from a variety of sources excavated
in recent decades and was not apparent to Layard or the early
pioneers of cuneiform. The tablets that reveal these acts of forced
collection are perhaps the earliest forerunner of what we now call
displaced or migrated archives (to which we will turn in chapter
11), a practice that has been taking place for millennia. A large
number of the surviving tablets from Ashurbanipal’s library came
through this route.15
Our understanding of this practice has been expanded through
the discovery of tablets excavated at many other sites in the region,
such as Borsippa in what is now southern Iraq. In the first millen-
nium bce, Borsippa was part of the Babylonian Empire, subjugated
by Assyria. Tablets excavated there preserve later copies of a letter
originally sent from Nineveh to an agent, Shadunu, who was charged
to visit a group of scholars in their homes and to ‘collect whatever
tablets are stored in the temple in Ezida’ (the temple of Nabu,
especially dedicated to scholarship, at Borsippa).16 The desiderata
are named quite specifically, which suggests that Ashurbanipal knew
what might have been available in the collections of private schol-
ars.17 Ashurbanipal’s instructions were clear and uncompromising:
. . . whatever is needed for the palace, whatever there is, and rare
tablets that are known to you and do not exist in Assyria, search
them out and bring them to me! . . . And should you find any
tablet or ritual instruction that I have not written to you about that
is good for the palace, take that as well and send it to me . . .18

This letter corroborates evidence from other tablets in the British

Museum, that Ashurbanipal both seized and also paid scholars to
give up their tablets, or to copy some of their own tablets and
others in the famous collection at Borsippa well known for its
sophisticated scribal tradition.
A small group of accession records survive, which help us get a
broader sense of the way these seizures helped to build Ashurbanipal’s

24
 cracked clay under the mounds

great library at Nineveh (and also confirm the sense that the library
was very carefully organised and managed). The scale is something
that is immediately surprising. Of the 30,000 tablets that are known
to survive from Ashurbanipal’s library, the group of accession records
suggests an intake at one time of around 2,000 tablets and 300 ivory
or wooden writing boards. This was an immense single accession
and the materials ranged over thirty genres from astrological omens
to medical recipes. The provenance of the material is not recorded
in every case but it is clear that the tablets came from private libraries
in Babylonia. Some of them seem to have been ‘gifted’ by the
scholars who owned them, perhaps to curry favour with the royal
authorities in Nineveh, perhaps to give up some material so that
the rest of their libraries could be left. The only dates that are
identifiable point to 647 bce, mere months after the fall of Babylonia
during the civil war between Ashurbanipal and his brother Shamash-­
shumu-­ukin. The conclusion is clear: he used the military victory
as an opportunity to enlarge his own library through the enforced
sequestration of knowledge.19
But Ashurbanipal’s library was soon to suffer a similar fate. His
victory over Babylonia would provoke a burning desire for revenge,
and this was wreaked on Ashurbanipal’s grandson Sin-­shar-­ishkun,
who succeeded his father in 631 bce. The Babylonians allied with
the neighbouring Medes, whose forces besieged Nineveh in 612
bce, eventually taking the city and unleashing a torrent of destruc-
tive force, which would encompass the collections of knowledge,
including the library formed by Ashurbanipal. Although Layard’s
work uncovered remarkable feats of preservation and acquisition,
everywhere he dug there was also evidence of fire and violence.
The excavations revealed layers of ash, objects were found to have
been deliberately smashed inside rooms, and some of the discoveries
of human remains were particularly horrific for later archaeologists
at nearby Nimrud, who found bodies, their limbs still shackled,
that had been thrown down a well.20
While the destruction of Ashurbanipal’s library at the fall of
Nineveh was a catastrophic act, the precise details of what happened
are unclear. The major library and archival collections may simply
have been swept up in the general destruction of the palace complex.
Fires and looting were widespread across the site, and we cannot

25
 burning the books

tell whether the library was specifically targeted, although evidence

does survive of the smashing of specific tablets (such as diplomatic
treaties).21 At the Temple of Nabu in Nimrud, for example, sealed
tablets of the vassal treaties of Esarhaddon, father of Ashurbanipal,
were found smashed to pieces on the floor, left there as the battle
raged around the great city, not to be found until two and a half
millennia later.22
The Royal Library at Nineveh is the most celebrated collection
of its kind from the Mesopotamian civilisations, but it was not the
earliest. More than five thousand tablets have been found at Uruk
in southern Iraq and date from the fourth millennium bce, and are
mainly concerned with economics, but also with naming things. A
thousand years later we have evidence from Syria, in the ancient
site of Ebla (south of the modern city of Aleppo), that there were
scriptoria and library/archive rooms, including brick benches to
help sort through tablets. Although there was no specific architec-
tural expression of libraries as separate buildings, from this period
there is growing evidence of the emergence of curatorial techniques
for managing information, including different modes of storage.
These include devices such as wooden shelves or stone pigeonholes
found in the archive room of the Temple of Nabu at Khorsabad
(the former capital of Assyria until it was moved to Nineveh), and
shelves in the Temple of Shamash in the Babylonian city of Sippar,
which were used to help sort collections of tablets, implying that
their number had become so numerous that special techniques were
required to help sort and manage their collection.23 The use of
metadata (in the form of labels and other ways of describing the
contents of the tablets) to aid retrieval of information and scribal
copying alongside the storage of texts was also a feature of innova-
tion throughout the civilisations of Mesopotamia. The necessity to
keep knowledge safe and to enable the sharing of it through copying
has very ancient roots, coterminous with civilisation itself.
Direct evidence of the libraries and archives of the ancient world
is scarce and the nature of the societies that developed these collec-
tions is so different from ours that it is dangerous to draw too many
close parallels. Despite these caveats I think it is possible to suggest
some broad patterns.
The libraries and archives of Mesopotamia, especially the library

26
 cracked clay under the mounds

of Ashurbanipal, show that the ancient world understood the import-

ance of accumulating and preserving knowledge. These civilisations
developed sophisticated methods: organising clay tablets, adding
metadata to help with storage and retrieval as the size of collections
grew. The copying of texts was also supported, for dissemination
among the small elite groups in the royal households who were
allowed access to them.
These collections were often formed by the rulers who thought
the acquisition of knowledge increased their power. The forced
collection of clay tablets from neighbouring and enemy states
deprived those enemies of knowledge and made them weaker. As
many of the texts were concerned with predicting the future,
capturing tablets would not only help you make better predictions
but it would also mean your enemy would be worse at understanding
the future.
From Ashurbanipal’s library we have a sense of what it preserved
for the benefit of successive generations, as tablets were passed on
from father to son, including those of the Epic of Gilgamesh. There
was an understanding even then that the preservation of knowledge
had a value not just for the present but for the future. The survival
of the collections themselves is accidental. The civilisations fell and
did not endure. Their libraries and archives, even those designed
to persist, have only been discovered in recent centuries, and then
only through scholars at the dawn of archaeology.

27
 burning the books

The poet Virgil holding a scroll, seated between a lectern for writing, and
a ‘capsa’ (or book box) for holding scrolls, early fifth century.

28
 a pyre of papyrus

2
A Pyre of Papyrus

A s we think about the legacy of ancient libraries in the public

consciousness, there is one legendary library whose fame has
outlasted all others: Alexandria. Despite the fact that it existed far
later than those in Mesopotamia, and that no material evidence
survives from the library itself, Alexandria is the archetypal library
of the Western imagination, and is still often referred to as the
greatest library ever assembled by the great civilisations of the ancient
world.
Despite the fact that our knowledge of the Library of Alexandria
is patchy, to say the least – the primary sources being few, mostly
repeating other sources now lost or too distant to verify – the idea
of a truly universal library, a single place where the entire knowledge
of the world was stored, has inspired writers and librarians throughout
history. We do know that there were in fact two libraries in ancient
Alexandria, the Mouseion and the Serapeum, or the Inner and
Outer Libraries. The Mouseion was a temple to the muses – nine
Greek sister goddesses who presided over human creativity and
knowledge, everything from history to epic poetry to astronomy
– and is where we get our term ‘museum’ from. The Mouseion
was, however, far from a museum: it was a living library, full of
books (in the form of scrolls) and scholars.
The Mouseion was a great storehouse of knowledge, a place
for scholars to come and study. The building was located in the
Royal Quarter, the Broucheion, close to the palace, giving a clear
indication of its importance.1 Strabo, the Greek historian and
geographer, writing in the first few years of the Christian era,
highlighted the importance of royal patronage for the library, and
described it as having a shared dining space where the king would
sometimes join the scholars.2 These scholars read like a roll call of

29
 burning the books

the great thinkers of the ancient world, including not just Euclid
(the father of geometry) and Archimedes (the father of engineering)
but Eratosthenes who was the first person to calculate the circum-
ference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Many of the
intellectual breakthroughs that modern civilisation is based on can
be traced to their work.
An offshoot of the library was held in the Serapeum, a temple
to the ‘invented’ god Serapis. Ancient writers disputed whether
Ptolemy I or II had introduced the cult of Serapis to Egypt, but
archaeological evidence demonstrates that the temple was founded
by Ptolemy III Euergetes I (246–221 bce).3 The foundation of this
library legitimised it further. Like the Mouseion it was built to
impress. Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus described it as ‘so
adorned with extensive columned halls, with almost breathing
statues, and a great number of other works of art, that next to the
Capitolium [Rome’s central temple], with which revered Rome
elevates herself to eternity, the whole world beholds nothing more
magnificent’.4
The Library of Alexandria grew steadily following its foundation,
according to a curious document known as the Letter of Aristeas,
written around 100 bce. This document tells us that within a short
period from its foundation the library grew to 500,000 scrolls, and
that the addition of the Serapeum brought greater capacity. The
Roman historian Aulus Gellius in his compendium Attic Nights gave
a figure of 700,000 volumes, split across the two libraries. John
Tzetzes got a little more precise – librarians tend to feel much
happier with precise counts of their collections – stating that the
Mouseion held 490,000 volumes and the Serapeum 42,800. We
must treat the ancient estimates of the size of the collection with
extreme caution. Given the extent of the surviving literature from
the ancient world, the numbers quoted for the library cannot be
realistic. While these estimates need to be looked at sceptically, they
make it clear that the library was enormous, much bigger than any
other collection known at the time.5
What can be said concerning the role that the Library of
Alexandria played in the ancient kingdom? Was it more than just
a storehouse of knowledge? While we know practically nothing
about how the library operated, it seems that together with the

30
 a pyre of papyrus

evident ambition to acquire and preserve knowledge, there was a

desire to encourage learning too. Aphthonius, writing in the fourth
century ce, speaks of ‘storehouses . . . open to those eager to study,
an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom’.6 It may be
that the ‘legend’ of Alexandria has as much to do with the acces-
sibility of the knowledge it contained as the size of the collection.
We know from the Roman historian Suetonius that the Emperor
Domitian at the end of the first century ce sent scribes to Alexandria
to copy texts that had been lost in various Roman library fires.7
The large size of the two libraries, and the resident community of
scholars of the Mouseion, and the liberal access policy, combined
to create an aura around the library that placed it at the centre of
scholarship and learning.
When the Library of Alexandria has been discussed, more often
than not it is the cautionary tale of its destruction that is invoked
– that towering library, said to contain a vast ocean of knowledge,
razed to the ground in a fiery blaze. In some ways the destruction
of the library has become as important, if not more, to its legacy
as its existence. This is made clear when we realise that the classic
story of Alexandria, consumed by one catastrophic inferno, is a
myth. In fact it is a collection of myths and legends (often contra-
dicting one another) that the popular imagination continues to
cling to.
One account, perhaps the best known, is the story told by
Ammianus Marcellinus who in his History (written around ce
380–390) declared that the ‘unanimous testimony of ancient records
declares that 700,000 books, brought together by the unremitting
energy of the Ptolemaic kings, were burned in the Alexandrine
war, when the city was sacked under the dictator Caesar’.8 Another
ancient writer, Plutarch, gives us more detail about the burning.
After an Alexandrian mob had turned against the Romans, Caesar
was forced to barricade himself in the palace quarter near the
dockyards. An attempt was made to ‘cut him off from his navy’,
and ‘he was forced to fend off the danger with fire, and this,
spreading from the dockyards, destroyed the great library’. We get
a slightly different take from Dio Cassius who, in his Roman History
(written circa ce 230), tells us that although ‘many places were set
on fire’ it was the storerooms in the dockyards rather than the

31
 burning the books

Mouseion (library), both those of ‘grain and books, said to be great

in number and of the finest’, that were destroyed.9
This myth – that Caesar was responsible for the destruction in
some way – has had to compete through history with others. By
ce 391, Alexandria had become a Christian city, and its religious
leader, the Patriarch Theophilus, lost patience with the pagan occu-
piers of the Serapeum and destroyed the temple. In ce 642 the
Muslim occupation of Egypt saw the occupation of Alexandria for
the first time, and one account of the destruction of the library
attributes its demise to deliberate destruction by Amr (the Arab
military leader who had conquered the city) on the orders of the
Caliph Omar. This account ascribes a perverse logic to the Caliph:
‘If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they
are useless, and need not be preserved,’ so the account tells us: ‘if
they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.’ This
legend describes the orders of the Caliph being ‘executed with blind
obedience’, the scrolls being distributed to Alexandria’s four thou-
sand baths, where they were used as fuel to heat the water, taking
six months to exhaust the supply.10
What the ancient historians all agree on, is that the library was
destroyed. The weight of their opinions helped to propagate the
myth. That propulsion was greatly speeded in the late eighteenth
century with the publication of volume III of Edward Gibbon’s
great epic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
which includes the most vivid passage about the destruction of the
library that had yet appeared in the English language. This passage
would make the loss of Alexandria the powerful symbol for barbarity
that it still is today. ‘The valuable library of Alexandria was pillaged
or destroyed; and near twenty years afterwards, the appearance of
the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spec-
tator whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice,’
he wrote, emphasising the loss of the ‘compositions of ancient
genius’ and lamenting that so many works had ‘irretrievably
perished’.11
What these myths all have in common is that they mourn the
library as a victim of barbarity triumphing over knowledge. These
stories have encouraged the symbolisation of Alexandria: the telling
and retelling of the myths has led to its name being almost always

32
 a pyre of papyrus

invoked as metaphor, either to capture the desire to amass universal

know­ledge or to convey the loss of great amounts of knowledge.
But what really happened to the Library of Alexandria? And is
there more we can learn from its destruction, and its existence,
behind the myth?
The fact that the library failed to exist beyond the classical period
is unquestioned. Exactly why is less clear. Caesar himself reported
the burning of Alexandria as an accidental consequence of his war
against his great rival Pompey, in 48–47 bce. Ships bringing enemy
troops had been docked in the harbour, close to a series of ware-
houses, and Caesar’s troops torched them. In the conflagration that
followed, a number of nearby warehouses were destroyed. Following
the city’s instructions that all incoming ships should be searched for
books, which were required to be copied for the library, it is feasible
that these seized books had been temporarily stored in the dockside
warehouses. Material damage was done to the collections of the
library, but it was not its end. This ties in with the account of the
geographer Strabo who did much of his own research some decades
after the events of 48–47 bce using sources from the library.12
Both libraries were very fragile. The Serapeum seems to have
suffered a fire at some point around ce 181 and again in 217 but
was rebuilt, although there is no indication whether the fire affected
the library or just the temple complex.13 In ce 273 the Emperor
Aurelian recaptured Alexandria after it had been occupied by the
insurgent rebellion of Palmyra, destroying the palace complex and
almost certainly inflicting damage on the library (although no ancient
writers confirm this explicitly), but if this is a true record (and over
a century later the area had still not been rebuilt) then it is possible
that the Library of the Serapeum may have outlived the Mouseion.14
Gibbon’s profound statement about the loss of the library was
the result of a great deal of careful reading around the subject, and
his judgement on the most likely cause of the destruction can
enlighten us. He dismissed the idea that the destruction of the
library could be blamed on the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, and
the instruction of Caliph Omar. This version of events had been
reported by some early Christian writers (such as Abulpharagius),
especially the evocative story of the scrolls being fuel for the thou-
sands of hot baths in the city. Gibbon knew that this account had

33
 burning the books

evoked a strong response in the scholars who had encountered it

and ‘deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the learning, the arts,
and the genius, of antiquity’.15 The Enlightenment sceptic was
scathing in his analysis of that account: it was scarcely logical that
the Caliph would burn Jewish and Christian religious books, which
were also considered holy texts in Islam. Moreover the story was
implausible on practical grounds as ‘the conflagration would have
speedily expired in the deficiency of materials’.16
For Gibbon, the Library of Alexandria was one of the great
achievements of the classical world and its destruction – which he
concludes was due to a long and gradual process of neglect and
growing ignorance – was a symbol of the barbarity that overwhelmed
the Roman Empire, allowing civilisation to leach away what was
being re-­encountered and appreciated in his own day. The fires
(whether accidental or deliberate) were major incidents in which
many books were lost, but the institution of the library disappeared
more gradually both through organisational neglect and through
the gradual obsolescence of the papyrus scrolls themselves.
A manuscript by the medical scientist Galen, found relatively
recently in a monastery library in Greece, contains a previously
unknown account of a fire in ce 192 in the imperial library in
Rome. The library, known as the Domus Tiberiana, was on the
Palatine Hill in the heart of the city. The fire destroyed the original
scrolls that contained a famous Greek scholar’s edition of the works
of Homer, one of the most influential authors of the classical world
(and perhaps of all time).17 What is important is that these scrolls
had been brought to Rome from the Library of Alexandria as booty.
Seized by Lucius Aemilius Paullus, father of the famous Roman
general Scipio, from the defeated King Perseus of Macedon in 168
bce this was the first great collection of papyrus scrolls to be brought
back to Rome, and it had a profound effect on the literary life of
the city.18
Papyrus was first used in Egypt as a writing material. It was
derived from the papyrus rush, from which the pith could be
extracted from the stem. Layers of the pith were laid on top of one
another, fused together using water, dried in the sun, and then
smoothed to enable the surface to take a form of ink. The sheets
of papyrus were normally joined together and wrapped around a

34
 a pyre of papyrus

wooden rod to form a scroll (loosely termed liber in Latin, from

where we derive the word ‘library’). Papyrus itself would be replaced
by a more durable technology – parchment, developed in the western
Mediterranean and then across Europe and then by paper, brought
to the West from Asia through the agency of Arab craftsmen and
traders, but for four centuries papyrus was the dominant writing
medium.
One of the problems with papyrus was how easily it could be
set on fire. Being made from dried organic matter, wrapped tightly
around a wooden rod, it is inherently flammable, and when placed
in a library of similar materials, these weaknesses become potentially
disastrous. Most surviving papyrus was found as waste material, in
rubbish heaps in Egypt (like the famous site of Oxyrhynchus) or
as cartonnage – material used to wrap mummified bodies. The
number of surviving libraries of papyrus scrolls is tiny, with the
most famous being at Herculaneum – where the ‘Villa of the Papyri’
was discovered in the middle of the eighteenth century sealed under
the tsunami of volcanic ash that came out of nearby Mount Vesuvius
in ce 79. Eventually over 1,700 scrolls were excavated there, most
charred or completely fused by the heat of the eruption. Enough
of them are readable for us to know that the collector behind the
library must have been fascinated by Greek philosophy (especially
that of Philodemus).19 The fragile scrolls are still being unrolled and
deciphered, most recently via X-­ray: in 2018 it was announced that
part of Seneca’s famous lost Histories had been discovered on one
of them.
The environment papyrus is stored in is crucial to its long-­term
preservation. The climate of the coastal port of Alexandria was
humid, which would have affected the older scrolls, encouraging
mould and other organic decay.20 Other large library collections of
papyrus (such as that at Pergamon in present-­ day Turkey) went
through a process of recopying texts from papyrus scrolls onto
parchment, a writing material based on treated animal skin. This
was a kind of technological migration of knowledge from one
format to another.
A lack of oversight, leadership and investment spread over
centur­ies seems to have been the ultimate cause of the destruction
of the Library of Alexandria. Rather than highlighting the cataclysmic

35
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 The Project Gutenberg eBook of Nick Carter Stories
No. 145, June 19, 1915: An Unsolved Mystery; Or, Nick
Carter's Goverment Case
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
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eBook.

Title: Nick Carter Stories No. 145, June 19, 1915: An Unsolved
Mystery; Or, Nick Carter's Goverment Case

Author: Nicholas Carter

C. C. Waddell

Release date: May 8, 2022 [eBook #68022]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Street & Smaith, 1914

Credits: David Edwards, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (Northern
Illinois University Digital Library)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NICK

CARTER STORIES NO. 145, JUNE 19, 1915: AN UNSOLVED
MYSTERY; OR, NICK CARTER'S GOVERMENT CASE ***
 Issued Weekly. Entered as Second-class Matter at the New York Post
Office, by Street & Smith, 79-89 Seventh Ave., New York. Copyright, 1915,
by Street & Smith. O. G. Smith and G. C. Smith, Proprietors.
Terms to NICK CARTER STORIES Mail Subscribers.
Issued Weekly. Entered as Second-class Matter at the New York Post Office,
by Street & Smith, 79-89 Seventh Ave., New York. Copyright, 1915, by
Street & Smith. O. G. Smith and G. C. Smith, Proprietors.
Statement of ownership, management, circulation, etc., of Nick Carter
Stories, published weekly, at New York City, required by the Act of August
24, 1912.... Editor, W. E. Blackwell, 32 W. 75th Street, New York City....
Managing editors, business managers, publishers and owners, Street &
Smith, 79-89 Seventh Avenue, New York City.... Known bondholders,
mortgagees, and other security holders, holding 1 per cent. or more of total
amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None.... Signed by George
C. Smith, for Street & Smith.... Sworn to and subscribed before me this 30th
day of September, 1912, Chas. W. Ostertag, Notary Public No. 31, New
York County (my commission expires March 30th, 1913).

TERMS TO NICK CARTER STORIES MAIL SUBSCRIBERS.

(Postage Free.)
Single Copies or Back Numbers, 5c. Each.
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 1 copy two years 4.00
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properly credited and should let us know at once.

No. 145. NEW YORK, June 19, 1915. Price Five Cents.

AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY;
Or, NICK CARTER’S GOVERNMENT CASE.

Edited by CHICKERING CARTER.

 CHAPTER I.

A SECRET CONFERENCE.

The old gentleman passed the other two as if they were strangers. He
jostled by them without so much as a glance. The most observing person in
the throng then pouring out of the railway station, like a swarm of busy bees
out of a colossal hive, would have detected no relation between them.
While passing the couple, nevertheless, the old gentleman said quickly to
one of them, though scarce above his breath:
“Go to the new Willard. Register as directed, and get a suite, Wait there
till I come.”
The man addressed heard him, but did not turn his head, nor evince the
fact with the slightest change of countenance.
His companion, a natty, keen-eyed chap with a blond mustache twirled
upward at the ends à la kaiser, appeared oblivious to what had occurred.
The scene of this trivial episode, which was far more portentous than one
would suppose, having a bearing on no less tremendous an issue than the
possible fate of a nation, was the new Union Station in the city of
Washington, and the hour was two o’clock one fine afternoon in October.
The old gentleman hastened out with the throng into Massachusetts
Avenue, seeking a trolley car and mingling with the crowd in a plebian sort
of a way, as if business of no great importance had brought him to the
nation’s capital.
He rode down Pennsylvania Avenue as far as Fourteenth Street, where he
alighted and walked the remaining distance to the Treasury Building,
entering one of the side doors with an air and display of interest often
observed in the crowds of tourists to be seen in this vast building at that hour
of the day. No observer would have supposed him other than a sight-seeing
stranger, viewing Uncle Sam’s great money box and financial institution for
the first time in his life.
Something like five minutes later, nevertheless, he entered one of the
numerous offices without the ceremony of knocking, and blandly addressed
a clerk who turned from his desk to see who had entered.
“I suppose Chief Welden is inside?” he said inquiringly.
“Yes, sir,” bowed the clerk. “I will take in your card, or name, if——”
“Don’t trouble,” interrupted the old gentleman, smiling. “I am his uncle.
He is expecting me. I will go right in.”
He did not wait for an objection, had any been forthcoming, but opened a
near door and walked into an adjoining private office. It was quite large and
elaborately furnished. But the only occupant was an attractive, clean-cut man
seated at a large, roll-top desk.
“Don’t rise, Welden,” said the old gentleman, after closing the door.
“Have a look at my card. It will supply the needed link. Even you are not
likely to recognize me.”
Chief Welden, then the head of the United States secret service, glanced
at the card the speaker displayed for a moment and then coolly returned to
his own pocket.
It bore the name of the celebrated New York detective—Nick Carter.
Chief Welden laughed.
“Gracious!” said he, pointing to a chair with one hand and extending the
other. “No, indeed; I would not recognize you. You’re the limit, Nick, when
it comes to giving one a surprise. Why did you come in this rig?”
“A summons direct from the nation’s chief executive, Welden, must be
occasioned by something of vast importance,” Nick replied, drawing up a
chair and cordially shaking hands with the treasury official. “It imposes
corresponding circumspection upon one of my vocation. I decided to drop in
here under cover and learn what is wanted of me.”
“I knew that the president had communicated with you and I was
expecting you to show up during the day,” said Chief Welden, more gravely.
“I got the special-delivery letter this morning.”
“When did you arrive?”
“Half an hour ago.”
“Alone?”
“As you see,” said Nick evasively.
Chief Welden swung round in his swivel chair, so as to directly face the
noted detective. There had been other times when the keen and clever men
under his direction had been baffled by perplexing problems, resulting in an
appeal to the famous New York detective; but judging from Welden’s
expression at that moment, none could have been more important than that
which had occasioned this summons of Nick Carter to Washington, an
appeal direct from the president himself.
“I will tell you as briefly as possible what has occurred, Nick, and why it
has been thought wise to employ you,” said Welden.
“Do so,” bowed the detective.
“To begin with, Carter, we have in the war department a young man
named Harold Garland. He is about thirty, remarkably gifted along certain
lines, and strictly reliable. Understand that at the outset; his integrity is
above suspicion. I am absolutely sure of that.”
“Very good,” said Nick. “What about him?”
“He is a graduate from West Point, and is in the employ of the
government as an expert engineer, in which capacity he is, as I have said,
remarkably gifted. He unquestionably is without a peer in this country in his
special line. He has an office in the war department, and I will presently send
for him.”
“I shall be glad to meet him,” Nick observed.
“Now, to go back a little,” Chief Welden continued. “Something like
eight months ago, Nick, I was informed by two of our secret-service agents
abroad that foreign spies were known to be in Washington, said to be here on
some secret mission, the nature of which was not definitely known. It was
suspected, nevertheless, that they were here after information concerning
elaborate coast defenses and fortifications contemplated by the government,
which in some sections are under secret construction.”
“You received that information eight months ago?”
“Yes.”
“Were the reports verified? Were the spies identified?”
“Neither,” said Welden. “The suspicion could not be confirmed either
here or abroad. The fact that the same report came at about the same time
from two of our foreign agents, one then located in Vienna and the other in
Paris, and there having been no communication between them, led me to
give considerable credit to their report, much more than if there had been but
one.”
“I see the point,” Nick nodded.
 “We were not able to verify it, nevertheless, nor have we since succeeded
in doing so. Nor have our agents abroad been able to add to the meager
information obtained at the time. Under such circumstances, of course,
having no confirmation of their reports, the matter became a little stale after
eight months.”
“Naturally,” Nick allowed.
“But it was brought up again very vividly three days ago,” Chief Welden
pointedly added.
“How so?”
“I will explain in a nutshell.”
“I’m all attention.”
“For nearly a year, now, Garland has been collaborating with Captain
Arthur Backas, a naval officer now stationed in Annapolis, and who also is a
recognized expert along engineering lines.”
“I know him by name,” Nick bowed.
“For the past year these two government engineers have been secretly and
exclusively at work on plans for elaborate coast-line defenses and
fortifications extending from Chesapeake Bay to Sandy Hook. It is one
section of a vast and for the most part secret coast-defense system
contemplated by the government, and the first steps in the construction of
which have already been taken.”
“I follow you, Welden.”
“And you know, of course, that secrecy is one of the absolute
requirements in such work,” Chief Welden proceeded. “There is no occasion
for me to enlarge upon that. Secrecy is imperative to adequate protection. If
other nations were to learn——”
“I know all about that, Welden,” Nick interposed, checking him with a
gesture. “It goes without saying. Come to the point.”
“That may be done with few words,” Chief Welden replied. “Last Friday,
three days ago, Garland had occasion to confer with Captain Backas about a
very important part of their mutual plans, and he went to Annapolis for that
purpose.”
“I see.”
“He took the plans with him in a leather portfolio. He spent most of the
day with Captain Backas, returning alone to Washington in the early
evening. He was met at the Union Station by two young women, one the
only daughter of Senator Barclay, the other a Miss Verona Warren, an
intimate friend of Miss Barclay, and with whom Garland is deeply in love.
The girls knew he was to arrive from Annapolis at seven o’clock, and they
met him with Senator Barclay’s touring car, driven by his chauffeur. They at
once took Garland to his apartments, where they dropped him and returned
home.”
“Garland, I infer, brought back the plans taken to Annapolis,” Nick
observed.
“He put them in the portfolio before leaving the office in which he had
talked with Captain Backas. Their conference had been strictly private. The
portfolio did not leave Garland’s hands from that time until he entered his
apartments in the Grayling, where he has a safe in which to lock them. He
opened the portfolio to inclose a memorandum relating to the plans—and
found them gone.”
“The plans?”
“Yes. The portfolio contained, instead, a quantity of blank paper
resembling them in size and thickness.”
“I disagree with you,” said Nick, after listening with scarce a change of
countenance. “You have made one wrong statement.”
“Namely?”
“You said the portfolio did not leave Garland’s hands after he had placed
the plans in it,” said Nick. “It did leave them, Welden, or there could not
have been a substitution of worthless paper for such tremendously important
plans.”
Chief Welden smiled and nodded.
“That goes without saying,” he admitted. “As a matter of fact, Nick, it
was not the same portfolio.”
“The whole business had been substituted?”
“Exactly. The substituted portfolio was so like his own, however, that he
did not detect the difference until after he had opened it,” said Welden. “His
own was nearly new and his name was written with ink on the inside of a
flap that closes it, and which is secured with two small straps and buckles.
There was no name in the substituted portfolio. It was slightly defaced,
moreover, so like his own that he detected no difference.”
 “Which plainly denotes that whoever turned the trick, or planned and
directed the job, was perfectly familiar with Garland’s portfolio,” said Nick.
“That is obvious, of course,” Chief Welden agreed.
Nick Carter took up the matter as if it were merely a petty theft, instead
of one threatening the nation. No need to tell him, nevertheless, of the
terrible danger from further construction in accord with the stolen plans, or
of the vast expense and innumerable difficulties in changing them, they
presumably having been made to the best advantages discernible to the
expert government engineers in charge of that part of the work. One scarce
could conceive of a more serious and possibly far-reaching loss.
Nick gazed at Chief Welden for a moment, then asked tersely:
“Any clew?”
“None, so far,” was the reply.
“You suspect it was the work of the spies mentioned?”
“Naturally.”
“Who is on the case?”
“Several of my best men,” said Welden. “I have talked with the president,
who is much disturbed by the matter, and we realize that these men may be
known by sight and that they are connected with the secret service. We have
thought wise, therefore, to employ you on the case, assuming that you are
not known and can work to greater advantage. There is this much to it,
Carter,” he forcibly added: “Those plans must be recovered. They must be
found before copies can be made, or——”
“One moment,” Nick interposed. “I appreciate all that is involved. It is
bad, terribly bad, but I will do my best to meet the situation. Send for
Garland. I wish to question him.”
“I think I can answer any questions that——”
“You won’t do,” Nick again interrupted. “I might ask questions that you
could not possibly answer. I shall want them answered. Send for Garland. I
wish to talk with him.”
Chief Welden turned to his desk and rang for the clerk in the outer office.
 CHAPTER II.

THE GOVERNMENT ENGINEER.

Nick Carter was a keen physiognomist. He no sooner saw the face of the
young man who entered Chief Welden’s office a little later, than he was sure
of his lofty character and sterling integrity, as Welden already had asserted.
He was tall and erect, with the carriage of a soldier and set up like an
athlete. His smoothly shaved face was of a classical cast, with clean-cut,
regular features, a fair complexion, and frank blue eyes, with a broad brow
and wavy brown hair.
He then looked white and drawn, however, as men look who have aged
years in as many days under some terrible experience. Mental distress of the
most poignant kind was reflected in his face, and Nick rightly inferred, as
Chief Welden also perceived, that the young man apprehended further
direful disclosures and additional misery from this unexpected summons to
the chief’s office.
Welden hastened to reassure him, however, by saying, with sympathetic
voice and a smile:
“Draw up a chair, Garland, and shake hands with this gentleman. We
have brought him from New York to pull you out of this affair. I think he
may succeed in doing so, for he rarely fails, if ever, in what he seriously
undertakes. His own mother would not know him just now, however. Shake
hands with Nick Carter.”
Garland’s face lighted as if a ray of sunshine had fallen on it. He clasped
Nick’s hand, felt its cordial and sympathetic pressure, and his voice choked
despite himself.
“I’m awfully glad to know you, Mr. Carter, and ten thousand times more
so in knowing that you are to look into this matter,” he said feelingly; then,
with a quick glance at the chief: “Why have I not been told of this, Chief
Welden? You know what horrible anguish and anxiety I am undergoing.”
“Very true, Garland,” said Welden, smiling significantly. “But we did not
know positively that Carter would be in a position to comply with the
president’s request. What good to have extended you false hopes? Sit down,
now, and have a talk with Mr. Carter. He wants to ask you a few questions.”
Garland hastened to comply, while Nick said, in a more businesslike
fashion:
“Welden has told me all of the superficial circumstances, Mr. Garland,
and I’ll do what I can for you. Let’s waste no time in getting right at the
matter, for time is always valuable. Steady yourself and answer my questions
as quickly and concisely as possible.”
“I will do so, Mr. Carter,” said Garland eagerly.
“To begin with, then, who else occupies your office in the war
department? Are there any clerks, or others, in the employ of the
government?”
“No, indeed,” said Garland. “I have a private room and an outer office
resembling these. I employ only a girl stenographer, who has a desk in the
outer office.”
“Does she know on what work you have been engaged?”
“No, sir. That is known only to Captain Backas and the heads of the
department.”
“All of whom are, of course, perfectly reliable,” said Nick. “I now am
aiming only to pick up a clew, Garland, to the identity of the person who
could have had the information necessary to have framed up this job. Did
your stenographer know you were going to Annapolis last Friday?”
“Yes, sir. I told her I was going the day before.”
“Did you tell her for what?”
“No.”
“Let’s make a jump, then,” said Nick. “Whom did you see in Annapolis,
who might by any means have learned of your mission?”
“Only Captain Backas,” said Garland emphatically. “I went directly to his
office, where I remained until I left for my train to Washington.”
“Who else was in the office during your conference with Captain
Backas?”
“Nobody. We were alone.”
“Did any one enter while you were talking with him?”
“No, sir. I am sure of that.”
 “And you are sure you placed the missing plans in the portfolio before
leaving, and that it was not substituted for another before you left?”
“Yes, sir; absolutely sure.”
“How did you go to the station?”
“In a taxicab.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good,” said Nick. “Where did you ride in the train?”
“In the smoking car,” said Garland. “I occupied a seat alone.”
“Where was the portfolio?”
“I placed it between me and the wall of the car, next to the window,
where my arm could rest on it during the ride. I was reading a book in the
meantime.”
“Could the portfolio have been removed by a person in the seat behind
you without your knowing it?” Nick inquired.
“No, sir, absolutely,” said Garland. “When I placed it there, Mr. Carter, I
made sure there was no space between the end of the seat and the wall,
through which the portfolio could slip. Naturally, sir, knowing the vast
importance of its contents, I was exceedingly careful and constantly alert. It
would have been utterly impossible for any person to have removed my
portfolio and substituted another on the train.”
“We will go a step farther, then,” said Nick. “When you arrived in
Washington and came from the Union Station, what did you do?”
“I hastened to find my friends who promised to meet me, Miss Barclay
and Miss Warren,” said Garland. “I found them nearly opposite the main
exit. I got into the automobile with them and they——”
“One moment,” Nick interposed. “Was it a limousine or an ordinary
touring car?”
“A touring car.”
“Top up?”
“No, sir.”
“Who was in the car?”
“Only the two ladies and Hopkins, the chauffeur,” said Garland. “To be
more correct, however, Miss Barclay had alighted and was standing beside
the car when I approached. She knew I would like to ride in the seat with
Miss Warren, of whom I am especially fond, and she took the seat next to the
chauffeur after our greeting.”
“Just before you started for home, I infer?”
“Certainly.”
“What were you carrying except the portfolio?”
“Only the book I had been reading.”
“What did you do with them after entering the touring car?”
“I placed them beside me on the seat,” said Garland.
Then, with a quick frown, he impulsively added:
“See here, Mr. Carter, don’t suppose for a moment that either of my
companions at that time know anything about this matter. They are incapable
of such treachery as that. Put it out of your head, sir, if you have any such
suspicion. I know positively that Verona Warren and Miss Barclay are above
——”
“Pardon me,” Nick interrupted a bit dryly. “What you know about them,
Mr. Garland, is not material. I am not seeking to cast suspicion upon any
one, least of all, your two lady friends. I want only to trace your movements
as precisely as possible from the moment you left Annapolis. Pray don’t
infer that I have formed any definite suspicion.”
A tinge of color came to Garland’s pale face.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Carter,” he said quickly. “I meant no offense. Nor
do I question your motives. None could realize more keenly how much
depends upon what you can do for me. Please continue your questions. I will
answer them to the best of my ability.”
“Very good,” Nick replied. “As a matter of fact, then, you have not the
slightest idea when, where, or by whom one portfolio was substituted for the
other?”
“No, Mr. Carter, not the slightest,” Garland quickly answered. “I am
absolutely in the dark. I nearly fainted when I opened the portfolio and
discovered my loss.”
“Were you then alone in your apartments?”
“I was.”
“What is the Grayling?” Nick inquired. “A hotel?”
 “No. It is a private boarding house in Vermont Avenue, not far from the
Thomas Circle.”
“It’s a first-class house, Carter,” put in Chief Welden.
“I have no family,” Garland added. “I’m quite alone in the world and
likely to remain so—unless Verona Warren accepts me for her husband. It
was my intention to lock the portfolio in a safe which I have in my room. I
frequently have taken plans home for night study, Mr. Carter, so I thought
nothing of doing so on this occasion. It was too late to put them in the vault
in the department building.”
“How soon after entering your room did you open the portfolio?” Nick
asked.
“Immediately,” said Garland. “I had in my overcoat pocket a
memorandum relating to the plans, and I was about to put it in the portfolio
before removing my coat.”
“The substitution could not possibly have been made, then, after you
entered your room?” Nick questioned.
“No, sir. There was no other person in the room.”
“How long have you had the portfolio, Mr. Garland?”
“About a month. I bought it expressly to carry the plans in when I had
occasion to take them from my office.”
“Where did you buy it?”
“In Raymond’s leather store in Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“Were you alone at that time?”
“I was.”
“Did you see others like it in the store?”
“Yes. There were several of the same kind.”
“Now, Mr. Garland, about the plans,” said Nick. “Are they so marked that
the thief, or thieves, can definitely determine what they are and to precisely
what part of the government work they relate?”
“No, not immediately,” said Garland. “They are marked in cipher. It
would take an expert, even, some little time to thoroughly understand them
and to what they refer. In that, Mr. Carter, lies our only hope. If the plans
could be recovered before the rascals learn just what they are——”
“They know what they are, Garland, or they would not have framed up so
crafty a job to get them,” Nick interrupted. “We may be able, nevertheless, to
recover them before they can be deciphered and definitely understood. In
that, as you have said, lies our only hope. I will lose no time in getting in my
work.”
“What are your plans, Nick?” Chief Welden inquired. “If I can aid you in
any way——”
“I will let you know, Welden, in that case,” Nick interposed, rising to go.
“I have no plans at present, nor do I know just how I shall proceed. I must
consider the circumstances thoroughly. I will note your home address, Mr.
Garland, in case I want to reach you out of business hours. That is all I
require of you at present.”
 CHAPTER III.

A CURIOUS CLEW.

It was nearly four o’clock when Nick Carter left the Treasury Building,
and he at once turned his steps toward the hotel to which he had directed the
two men who had emerged with him from the Union Station.
They were, as no doubt was inferred, his two most efficient assistants,
Chick Carter and Patsy Garvan, both in disguise, and four o’clock found
them seated in the suite assigned them, to which their trunks and other
luggage already had been brought.
Both then had removed their disguise and were reading the local
newspapers, when Nick knocked on the door and was admitted by Patsy.
“Well, chief, what’s up?” Patsy eagerly inquired, after closing the door.
Nick removed his outside garments and sat down.
“We have a hard nut to crack,” he replied. “The case is a serious one, very
serious.”
“What’s the nature of it?” Chick questioned. “I have been vainly
searching the newspapers.”
“The case has not reached the newspapers. The facts have been
suppressed. They are known by only a few except the persons involved.”
Nick then proceeded to tell them of what the case consisted, covering in
detail all that he had learned from Chief Welden and Harold Garland.
“By Jove, it does look like a hard nut to crack,” Chick agreed, after
listening attentively. “It will make a mighty bad mess for the government
unless those plans can be quickly recovered. Have you any definite
suspicions?”
“Not exactly,” Nick replied. “There is one point on which we first must
decide.”
“Just when and where the dummy portfolio was substituted for the other,”
said Chick.
“Precisely.”
 “How can we arrive at that?”
“By a process of elimination,” said Nick. “It’s not reasonable to suppose,
in view of Garland’s positive assertions, that Captain Backas is guilty of
treachery and treason.”
“Surely not,” Chick coincided. “Furthermore, he would not have taken
the risk that Garland would discover the crime even before leaving, or
arriving at the Annapolis station. In that case he would, of course, have
instantly attributed the crime to Backas.”
“Very true,” Nick nodded. “That alone is enough to confirm Garland’s
statements. He undoubtedly had the plans, then, when he started for the
station. He rode alone in a taxicab. We can safely assume, then, that he still
had his own portfolio when he boarded the train.”
“It strikes me, chief, that there is the most likely place for the trick to
have been turned,” said Patsy.
“I don’t agree with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the publicity on a train,” said Nick. “It would have been
exceedingly difficult to steal the portfolio and substitute another without
being seen by other passengers. If caught in the act, moreover, escape from a
fast-moving train is almost impossible. Crooks shrink from taking such
chances. They would have been much more likely to select a safer place for
the job.”
“That seems reasonable, chief, after all,” nodded Patsy.
“It convinced me that Garland is right, which eliminates that part of his
journey,” Nick continued. “I think he had his own portfolio up to the time he
entered the touring car with the two young ladies.”
“But would either of them serve him such a trick?” Chick questioned
doubtfully.
“Garland don’t think so,” Nick replied, smiling. “He was very quick to
resent a mere suggestion to that effect. He admits having placed the portfolio
on the seat, nevertheless, and it may have been then, or during the ride to his
apartments, that the substitution was accomplished.”
“By one of the women?”
“Presumably. The chauffeur could not have done it without being
detected.”