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The fifteenth century had been a library era throughout. In the sixteenth came the Reformation, which swept away “papistical” libraries. More than eight hundred libraries of monastic orders, in England alone, were dispersed or destroyed by this iconoclastic whirlwind. In 1540 the only libraries left were at Oxford and Cambridge and in the cathedrals. But at the same time, the invention and rapid spread of printing had superseded the slow processes of making manuscript books, and had opened a new life for libraries. The first library built under these new conditions was that of St. John’s College, which brought over from the monastic and early college era the alcove arrangement.

The renaissance of wall shelving spread rapidly. Compared with the chaining of books to the shelves, which it superseded, it was an open-access reform. To quote Cardinal Mazarin’s library motto, “Publice patere voluit.” It was quickly followed in France, but more slowly in England. In 1610 this form of shelving with a gallery was adopted in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (see illustration on p. 275 of Clark), the progenitor of our first distinctive American library interiors, now discredited and almost abandoned.