Trinity College Dublin Library

The Library of Trinity College Dublin begins with the college itself in 1592, and its shape was set less by purchase than by donation. James Ussher's collection came in 1661. Henry Jones, later Bishop of Meath, gave the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow in the early 1660s. The Fagel collection arrived in 1802. Legal deposit privilege was granted in 1801, and the library continues to receive material published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which turned a college library into something closer to a national one by statute rather than by anybody's intent.

It now holds over six million printed volumes, with collections of journals, manuscripts, maps and music built up across more than four hundred years, and it is the largest library in Ireland. The Old Library, the eighteenth century building whose long chamber is itself a visitor attraction, houses the Department of Early Printed Books and Special Collections and the exhibition through which most people meet the Book of Kells.

The atlas records the library as a custodian of manuscripts and not as a religious institution. Trinity College is a university; the books that bring it into this atlas are Christian gospel books made in Irish monastic scriptoria four hundred years before the college existed. Keeping those two facts distinct, the holder and the held, is the reason this atlas records libraries as their own category, apart from religious institutions.

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.