_Date._ _Place._ _Volumes._ A.D. 831 St. Riquier (French abbey) 250 10th cent. Bobbio (Italian monastery) 700 12th cent. Durham Cathedral about 700 1300 Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury about 1850 1395 Durham Cathedral 921 1418 Peterhouse, Cambridge 380 1424 University Library, Cambridge 122 1472 Queens’ College, Cambridge 199 1473 University Library, Cambridge 330 [Sidenote: Library Fittings.] The earliest fittings for the convenience of readers which still exist suggest that at any rate in collegiate institutions the first kind of desk was on what Mr. J. Willis Clark termed the Lectern system. One has to imagine a double lectern (that is, two plain lecterns placed back to back) so prolonged as to hold say five to fifteen volumes on each side, every volume lying on its side and being chained to the desk. The reader stood or sat, and the open book lay before him at a convenient angle, as in church lecterns. The system was obviously very wasteful of space, and was evolved from the time when one or two books only were brought out of the cupboard (_armarium_) for a reader’s use on a desk resembling a lectern, near a window. In the fifteenth century the normal type of library was a narrow room of considerable length, lighted by narrow windows at short intervals. From the wall-spaces between the windows there projected into the room at right angles to the wall the lectern desks described above, the desks by this time being probably fitted beneath with shelves on which the (chained) books could stand upright, and be pulled out on to the lectern for purposes of reading. Next came the “Stall system.” In this, the cases projecting from the wall are just book-cases, of three or four or even more shelves on each side of the case, and the lectern part is superseded by a flat desk in front of, and attached to, the shelves at which a reader sits, and on which he places the (chained) book he takes down from a shelf above him. The earliest example of these is at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1517), and they are still in use in the Old Reading Room (“Duke Humphrey”) of the Bodleian; and in the Chapter library at Hereford, the very chains of the books are still preserved.