What Survived, and What Did Not

The earliest hard fact about the Book of Kells is a theft. The Annals of Ulster record that in 1007 the great gospel book of Colum Cille was stolen at night from the western sacristy of the stone church at Kells, and call it the chief relic of the western world. It was found two months and twenty nights later, under sods, with its gold cover torn off. The cover has never been recovered and the manuscript has been coverless ever since, which means that what was probably the most valuable part of the object to the people who made it is simply gone, and gone without a description.

The book stayed at Kells until 1654, when it was sent to Dublin for safekeeping during the Cromwellian occupation, and it passed to Trinity College from Henry Jones in the early 1660s. It has been there since.

The other irreversible loss happened inside the library's own care. A nineteenth century binder trimmed the margins and cut into some of the decoration. That is worth setting beside the theft, because the two losses are of different kinds. One was violence from outside, and the record of it is the reason anybody knows the book existed in 1007 at all. The other was ordinary maintenance, carried out in good faith by people responsible for the book, to a standard that no longer applies. A custodian's mistakes belong in an object's history exactly as a thief's do, and the atlas records both without ranking them.