In an article for Wired in 1999, William Gibson idly mentions a coffee shop in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. It sounds like a typical Turkish cafe, except for the fact that it’s been open “twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, literally for centuries.”

Gibson does not linger on the subject. As a science fiction writer, he is drawn to the future rather than the past, in this case a Sony sign hanging in the bazaar, “bristling with an alien futurity.” But since I read his article about ten years ago, I have returned to thoughts of the Grand Bazaar’s eternal coffee shop almost daily. On some hectic mornings I visit it in my mind every few hours, drawn to it as a symbol of stability and purpose.

I did not realize that I was searching for more of this kind of constancy until I found myself underlining a section in Dark Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt’s recent biography of Christopher Marlowe. Between the tumult of Elizabeth I’s reign, the power struggles of London’s cutthroat theatrical scene, and a possible shadow existence as a government spy, Marlowe’s world seems notably short on stability—which only served to make something Greenblatt mentioned in passing stand out more.

Marlowe, the son of a Kentish shoemaker, owed his education at Cambridge’s Corpus Christi College to a scholarship established by Matthew Parker, a former master of the college and, as of 1559, the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Greenblatt mentioned something else about Parker that has stayed with me: he donated a library of rare books and manuscripts to Corpus Christi, with the condition that none of the books could ever go missing.

To this end Parker imposed an audit. Every year the college staff would count all the books Parker had given them, and if six large items or twelve small items had been lost, the entire library was to be forfeited and sent to a different college. This audit was carried out annually, for centuries. A quick Google suggested that, more than 450 years later, it was still taking place.

I could not get the audit out of my mind. It seemed such an unusual arrangement, and yet so perfectly in tune with my impression of the period as a time of conspiracy, inequality, and blossoming self-involvement. Old ideas no longer seem stable. A thudding fear of foreigners is enlivened by foolish war-making, and everyone is kept busy suing everyone else. Of course people would have to think creatively in order to preserve something as delicate as a library through an era like this.

It made me wonder: Was this kind of audit a common request? And if it wasn’t, what could a library contain of such importance that it had to be protected from time itself?

A few weeks later I went to see the Parker Library. I had imagined something either very new or very old: a sleek temperature-controlled Apple Store accessed through a complex series of airlocks, or a dusty spire where books were arranged around the calming turn of a stone staircase. The truth proved to be a chummy kind of middle ground. Behind the tall wooden door of the library, a small selection of the books and papers was brought out to me in an anteroom that fairly reeked of the academia of the 1970s and 1980s. The wood paneling was a sun-faded gold, and the best chairs had a pleasing sag.

The books I saw that morning had licorice-thick leather bindings rendered waxy by time, the paper inside as delicate as the petals of a pressed flower. They arrived in stylish grey cartons whose tops unfolded neatly, often revealing custom foam insets. It must be nice to work among books stored like this, each day a succession of presents to be opened.

Philippa Hoskin, the director of the library since 2019, is a historian of the English Middle Ages. She has the bright, keen eyes of a magpie and a cheerful clarity in her speech. At one point, the name of Stephen Langton, another Archbishop of Canterbury, came up. “He was a good man,” Hoskin said. She conveyed this with the air of one who has been personally touched by his goodness. When I got home I googled Langton. He died in 1228.

*

Matthew Parker was born in 1504 and died in 1575. As for the life between those dates, my sense was of a man in the background. It’s strange to think this of someone who was both the master of a Cambridge college and the Archbishop of Canterbury—and who, indeed, was an influential figure in the English Reformation and a leading steward of the Thirty-nine Articles, which laid out a new Anglican doctrine, charting a course through dark waters for the English Church. And yet the more I looked, the more Parker seemed a man glimpsed in the indexes of books that are about other people. He is hard-working, moderate, and uncharismatic, wielding his power with precision and care after seeking consensus. He is a name among many on joint letters. Portraits do not help him come into focus. The standard oil painting depicts a solid figure who seems stern and slightly suspicious, as if he has just read something that does not absolutely convince him. In my mind, he’s forever melting into the wood-paneled gloom of some Elizabethan drawing room where decisions are made by committee.

When Elizabeth appointed him as the Archbishop of Canterbury, she tasked him with establishing an English Church that would answer to the monarchy rather than Rome, and be conducted in English. (The church would also allow the clergy to have wives, and Parker himself was married.) Much of Parker’s collection therefore consists of historical precedents for this new church, going all the way back to Augustine of Canterbury. Many of the more than five hundred medieval books and manuscripts had previously belonged to the monasteries that were dissolved by Henry VIII. The library’s holdings include the Augustine Gospels from the sixth century, the earliest copy of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (dating from around 890), and various maps and travelogues and histories, from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica to copies of the writings of Matthew Paris.

Yet the Parker Library is also a reflection of the man. There are texts on alchemy, at least one of which is so covered with stains that it may well have seen practical use. There are bestiaries. There are atlases. “There is definitely a sense that he is getting new and important books,” Hoskin said, referencing a 1570 first edition of Abraham Ortelius’s maps of the world. “He is clearly interested in new and accurate knowledge…. [He’s] thinking about knowledge carefully.”

If the library’s collection begins to reveal Parker, its administration completes the portrait. The first thing Hoskin showed me, in the middle of its vast protective box, was a huge sheet of paper, a veritable ship’s sail, covered with tiny, beautiful writing, and shackled with four heavy wax seals at the bottom, each the size of a hockey puck and colored the deep reddish brown of old blood. This is the indenture for Parker’s library, the rules for caring for his books and manuscripts. It dates from 1574, the year before Parker died.

This indenture is one of four copies, which have all now been returned to the Parker Library. Corpus Christi was given one of them. Gonville and Caius College, which would get the library if Corpus Christi failed to look after it, had its own copy, as did Trinity Hall, the college that would receive the library if Gonville and Caius should fumble it too. Finally, the indenture I was shown was Parker’s personal copy, in a sense the library’s foundational document.

Hoskin pointed to one of the seals, which bears the imprint of a knuckle. Seals like this are an area of research for her, and also a subject of considerable wonder: a tactile connection to history.

“I’m pretty certain that Parker’s copy has Parker’s own knuckles in it,” she said, after some careful caveats. This copy also has his faint handwritten notes in the margin. They’re not amendments but reinforcements. “They don’t add things,” Hoskin said. “They say: ‘You’ve got to make an oath.’” Or: “‘This is how I want the books kept…. I want the large books in this part of the library. I want the smaller ones in chests and presses in this part of the library.’” Here, in other words, was something this careful, skeptical man put his whole force behind.

*

The history of Parker’s audit is complex. The idea is that every year on August 6, Parker’s birthday, masters from the three colleges should have dinner and check the books. Hoskin told me she has seen records of regular dinners dating back to the 1570s and through about 1630, when the master who had overseen them died. Evidence of audits disappears until the mid-1700s, then pops up again. The last audit Hoskin knows of occurred in 1837. At that point the indentures seem to have been returned to Corpus Christi.

To Hoskin, this tradition of convivial checks speaks not to Parker’s sternness but to a sense of communal care for the books he entrusted to the college. “When those masters came to audit the books, they probably weren’t ever hoping they’d return with them,” she said. “They were coming to help keep a heritage collection together for all of us.”

This may explain why the fine print for the audit is surprisingly generous. “If things are missed, books are missing entirely, we get three months to replace them,” Hoskin explained. “If six folio, eight quarto, or twelve smaller books are missing… we have six months to replace them.” She paused to consider the shame of failing to do so: the shame of losing the library. “So really we have to have been quite bad.”

Many of Parker’s books were already precious when he was collecting them, because academics were starting to understand how much of the relatively recent past was in danger of disappearing for good. This had to do with the dissolving of the monasteries and the scattering of their libraries, certainly, but also with the evolution of language and the dimming of collective memory. Parker and people like him were already encountering English and Anglo-Saxon texts that they could no longer understand. This inspired them to collect manuscripts full of place names and word lists, Hoskin said, so that this kind of everyday knowledge would not be lost. They also collected grammar books. “There are famous grammars,” she said, “for teaching Latin to early English monks.” Parker was “exceptionally excited by copies of this,” a fact we can deduce from the sheer number of them he collected. “He’s going to learn Old English from the Latin.” Parker, it seems, was as worried about constancy and entropy and the passage of time as we are. The library isn’t just a fortress against loss. The idea of loss is its true subject.

Today the Parker Library has a ceremonial audit. “We don’t have a formal audit anymore,” Hoskin said. “But of course, I and my sub-librarian and my archivist check all the Parker books every year.” Yet the more I learned of the audit, the more I realized that it’s not as unusual an idea as I’d first thought. Every library is in a battle with entropy. Books are stolen, lost, and misfiled. Libraries, by their benevolent nature, want to scatter. Constancy and stability are to be found not in any one institution but in the bright human impulse behind Parker’s rules, the same one that had encouraged generations to keep this library, and so many others, intact.

As I left Cambridge, I thought about my two older brothers, both of whom happened to become librarians. They both see their libraries in the same way, too: beautiful, necessary spaces, but ones that require constant vigilance. It’s vital work, but it’s also exhausting, as Parker, who was apparently better at borrowing books than returning them, seemed to understand. After a long week in the stacks, my brothers often seem like they have been battling the inevitable.

Today we all have at least a limited sense of how much we do not know that was once known. Perhaps this is why I now sense in Parker’s bequest something that feels like the beginning of the modern world. Can you be truly modern without a deep, urgent understanding that things are being lost forever? And if you have that understanding, what do you do about it?