The Church as Librarian II

The Catholic Thing

In my previous column, I recommended that every diocese establish at least one library, as part of the Church's mission to be the Mater et magistra ("Mother and teacher"), to a barbarian world. I described the kinds of books I have found at antique stores and junk shops, and even our town dump, whence I have gathered complete hardcover sets of the works of Washington Irving and George Eliot, probably a day or so before they would be destroyed.
Which brings me to two considerations: What kinds of books would such a library include? How could they be obtained?
As to the latter, there are several obvious sources. Colleges are continually thinning out their stocks of old books. When they do so, they rarely consider the inherent value of the works they are removing. What matters is whether anyone checks them out, or their date of publication; the older books are the first to go.
We should not conclude anything at all from the fact that an old book has been standing in the stacks unused. My own library is full of valuable and unreplaced works cast off from college libraries hither and yon.
Sometimes, as with a complete set of German plays by the great Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer, these books were donated to the libraries by scholars, even by the school's own professors upon their retirement. One might then establish connections with librarians at local schools, saying, "Before you get rid of any books, let us go through them. It won't hurt anyone, after all." Better on a shelf than in a landfill.
Then there are the teachers and professors. Our house has a library of 9,000 books, about 6,000 of which would be fit for such a library: reference works, anthologies of literature, the complete works of many a poet, novels, books of philosophy and theology, histories, about thirty years' worth of bound literary and cultural magazines from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, art books, music books, Bibles in English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Welsh, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and other works in a variety of languages, including the complete corpus of poetry in Anglo-Saxon.
We do not live forever, so where will these books go, when we go? You cannot donate them to the local library. They do not want them. Nor will most schools and colleges take them. They do not want them, either.
But a Church library - a library built up on principles of quality and of the preservation of culture among barbarians - might take them, and gladly. And consider the value of the tax write-off for a charitable contribution of hundreds or thousands of books: there are obvious incentives for elderly people to donate rather than to destroy those works.
I have often, in visiting the same antique store over the years, seen the same books taking up space in a booth, unsold, year after year. The director of a library might go to such a place and offer to buy the whole stock, for a price that would exceed what the seller can reasonably expect to gain from it, though also for a price that would be far less than what each book would cost if bought singly.
What books the librarian would not be able to use might, if they are decent, be sold at a nominal price in the library's vestibule, a practice which would have the additional benefit of bringing people into the place.
Now to the first question: What kinds of books might we find there?
Consider the famous Image imprint from Doubleday Publishing. I have about fifty or sixty of their titles, but imagine a complete collection: handsome books, well edited, intelligent, and of a wide variety, from Copleston's magisterial histories of philosophy, to Catholic classics by writers such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, to Catholic novels from the twentieth century (Louis Hemon, Maria Chapdelaine; Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue; Helen White, A Watch in the Night).
Paulist Press used to publish very fine editions of the ancient Fathers, medieval mystics, post-Tridentine reform...