advising the latter of the important books in their fields of specialization.  He urges what might now be called “interlibrary loan” and other forms of sharing.  To keep the librarian on the straight and narrow, apparently a recurrent problem in Dury’s day, he recommends an annual meeting of a faculty board of governors where the librarian will give his annual report and put on an exhibition of the books he has acquired.  To allay the temptation to make a little money on the side by “trading” (Dury’s obsessive term) in the library’s books for his personal profit, the librarian is to receive administrative support for his various expenses during the year and, as a scholar working with other scholars within his university instead of as a mere factotum, the librarian is to receive an adequate salary (perhaps the only one of Dury’s reforms that must wait until the millennium).

The question remains to what extent Dury’s duties as the deputy librarian of the King’s Library allowed him to implement the reforms he advocated on paper.  The probable answer is, not very much.  The librarian’s duties and responsibilities described by Dury are those of an academic, university librarian, interacting with the faculty and participating fully in the intellectual life of a scholarly community.  The role of the librarian of the King’s Library would have been that of keeper of a static and isolated collection, and Dury is particularly critical of a merely custodial role:  “... their emploiment,” he writes of the typical librarian of his day, is “of little or no use further, then to look to the Books committed to their custodie, that they may not bee lost; or embezeled by those that use them:  and this is all” (p. 16).

The King’s Library was unquestionably magnificent; Charles’s father and brother Henry had been particularly zealous in building it up, acquiring such collections as that of Isaac Casaubon.  And Charles had been the recipient in 1628 of perhaps its greatest single treasure, the Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Bible in Greek, certainly an item that would have interested Dury.  The library had, in fact, great scholarly potential, but its continued existence was apparently an embarrassment to the Commonwealth, and the Puritan government merely wanted an overseer.  So, by the determination of others, the post of deputy keeper of the King’s Library was little but a sinecure for Dury, leaving him free to pursue his many other interests but powerless to implement the reforms he advocated in his pamphlet within the only library over which he ever had direct control.  Though he retained the post until the Restoration, he left the library itself early in 1654, never to return.