La table des matières: Roman (The Table of Contents: Novel)

Citation

Buckland, M.K. (2008), "La table des matières: Roman (The Table of Contents: Novel)", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 64 No. 5, pp. 786-787. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410810899790

A documentation whodunnit!

In Pennsylvania, a botanically‐minded librarian has been tortured and strangled soon after her retirement from a major pharmaceutical company. In Paris, Laurette Lerbier, a natural history museum librarian preparing an exhibit based on the encyclopedia of plants and their medicinal properties by Hildegarde of Bingen, the saintly twelfth‐century abbess, finds that her office has been ransacked. And why are two pages describing one plant inexplicably missing from the surviving copy of Hildegarde's treatise? Which plant was it? Could Hildegarde have described medicinal properties of interest to unscrupulous agents of Big Pharma?

Laurette wants to know and decides to trace the provenance of Hildegarde's encyclopedia through successive owners. One early owner was Pierre de la Ramée (1515‐1572), the first writer to use a table of contents. Another was Louis Moreri (1643‐1680), who pioneered the alphabetical arrangement of topics in his encyclopedia. During the turmoil of the French Revolution the encyclopedia was saved from destruction by Alexis Wagnières (1769‐1832), an advocate of the newfangled technology of using recycled playing cards to create easily‐updated, random‐access card indexes. Later it was acquired by Paul Otlet (1868‐1943), who advanced faceted classification, theorized hypertext, and envisioned a “world brain.” It just happens to be the case that ownership of the saintly Hildegarde's encyclopedia had passed from one pioneer of information science to another.

But there is more excitement than the purely historical in Laurette's detective adventures, which remind one of the “Perils of Pauline.” (As Chapter 24 ends she finds that she has been locked in the Mundaneum archives of Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine in Mons for the night and is being harassed by a lecherous colleague. She escapes by climbing up on top of a large pile of books where she spends the night reading an account of Lafontaine's sister Léonie's secret unrequited passion for Paul Otlet.)

Laurette is an attractive figure throughout, with a charming remedy when her boyfriend has a fever. Her friend Christine, is initially portrayed more negatively, but as the difficulties in her life become clearer, including the elitism of the Sorbonne establishment, a lack of administrative support for her academic work, and the arrogance and ignorance of the “Habilitation” jury that assesses her for promotion to full professor, we come to view her with increasing sympathy.

By now, it may have been noticed that in this book, published in Paris, the pioneers of information science are French, or French‐speaking, and so it is less than a total surprise to learn that Hildegarde's encyclopedia was rescued from the uncertain fate of Otlet's archives by none other than Suzanne Briet (1894‐1989). In an article about Briet some years ago, this reviewer expressed regret that Briet's published memoirs were cryptic and limited. If only, I wrote, she had left a fuller account. And here it is! Chapters 35 to 40 reprint Briet's previously unknown reminiscences, found by the enterprising Laurette. (Mind you, some details seem suspect and the tone is of a kinder, gentler Briet than is found in her other authenticated writings.)

Not only is this book a proper antidote to anyone who assumes that information science is historically an English‐language enterprise, it also helps undermine any chauvinist assumptions that only men contributed to it.

The author, Sylvie Fayet‐Scribe, is a member of the faculty of the University of Paris – Sorbonne and it is written with an insider's familiarity with the Sorbonne and nearby institutions. She also writes with historical authority, being the editor and compiler of a web site on the history of the organization of knowledge and the author of an excellent book on the history of documentation in France (Fayet‐Scribe, 1997, 2000).

Much of the content is historically authentic, but not in all details. The frustration in writing history books is the paralyzing lack of evidence concerning the private lives and inner feelings of historical figures. But in an historical novel like this a knowledgeable author can freely extend and enrich established historical evidence with imagined, but plausible additions, a wonderfully liberating option. Some of what Laurette discovers is fictional and so is one of the historical persons named above.

First novels commonly contain autobiographical elements and this novel appears to be no exception. Which parts, in this case, we leave as a mystery within the mystery.

References

Fayet‐Scribe, S. (Ed.) (1997), “Le savoir et ses outils d'accès: repères historiques” Solaris, Dossier 04 – 1997, available at: http://biblio‐fr.info.unicaen.fr/bnum/jelec/Solaris/d04/index.html (accessed December 30, 2007).

Fayet‐Scribe, S. (2000), Histoire de la documentation en France: Culture, science et technologie de l'information, 1895‐1937, CNRS éditions, Paris.