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The mod Bod

Four hundred years ago the august Bodleian Library refused a book request from Charles I. Now its rare, historic editions are going online where anyone can read them

In the dark-panelled hush of Duke Humfrey’s Library in Oxford, time doesn’t just stand still, it retreats. It inches back into the aisles and lingers on the cracked leather Latin-inscribed spines. It curls around a stone-wrought corbel — a shock-eyed face leaning out from the wall, hands over mouth, enacting its timeless injunction: “Tread lightly and talk little.”

Duke Humfrey’s is the foundation stone of the Bodleian Library, opened by Thomas Bodley in 1602 as a repository of knowledge for Oxford University, the oldest English-speaking university in the world. Francis Bacon called the Bodleian “an Ark to save learning from

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