The bookplate featured in this issue has not so much to do with a library as with a person who had some influence on the development of an important institution, the Royal (later Imperial) Library in Berlin. It also offers the opportunity to relate a rather curious life history.

            Charles Théophile Guichard was born into a middle-class family in Magdeburg, Germany, 1724, where his father was, among other things, a judge. Guichard possessed scholarly instincts, studying classical literature and Oriental languages at several universities, in preparation for a clerical career. However, something caused him to give up that goal, and he was subsequently appointed tutor to the son of the prince of Orange in Holland. As a result of this service, Guichard sought the post of librarian to the Dutch hereditary governor. When he was not successful in getting it, he entered the army of the States General as an ensign. Later he was promoted to captain (ultimately he became a colonel in the Prussian service), and in 1754 he traveled to England, where he continued his scholarly pursuits in the study of Greek and Roman military practice, study that resulted in a book on the subject. When the Seven Years War broke out, Guichard volunteered for the army of one of the German states allied with Prussia, then governed by Frederick the Great.

            Guichard, in the course of his duties, was presented to Frederick, and quickly became his close companion, although their relationship was not always a smooth one. Guichard was frequently the butt of Frederick’s often rather crude humor, and sometimes found himself out of the monarch’s favor and banished from court—but never for long. On one occasion they argued about the name of a centurion at the Battle of Pharsala. Guichard proved to be correct, and as a joke Frederick applied the name, Quintus Icilius, to his officer. A few days later, however, the name appeared in the muster rolls of the army, and Guichard acquired the name officially. He bore it good-naturedly to his grave.

            Icilius played a part in the development of the Royal Library, both in his relationship with Frederick, and in the Library’s acquisition of his personal collection after his death. This institution had its origin in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Great Elector of Prussia, Frederick William, opened his court library of around 20,000 volumes to the public. By 1740, partly with the help of a legal deposit system, it held around 75,000 volumes. Yet strangely, in spite of Frederick’s well-known love of learning, this great king did little during the first three decades of his reign to develop the Library. Apparently he found his own personal collection sufficient, and used state resources for other purposes.

            Quintus Icilius, of all others at the time, kept the Library in the king’s eye, serving in effect as its unofficial advocate. On one occasion he pushed the candidacy of Germany’s leading literary figure, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, as librarian, unfortunately without success; Frederick had little use for his native literature or its practitioners. Nonetheless, Icilius deserves some credit for prompting the extensive building program that Frederick finally initiated for the Library a year or two before Icilius’s death in 1775. By 1790, in fact, the Royal Library was to hold about 150,000 volumes, a vast collection for its day.

            One of the difficulties that Icilius had had with Frederick concerned the matter of his marriage. He had wished to wed the daughter of a man above him in station, and the king’s reluctant approval had cost him a period of disfavor. However, after his death the king, in an apparent attack of bad conscience over his treatment of the ever-faithful Icilius, provided his widow and children with money, and bought his books for the Library. Icilius’s collection consisted of around 3,500 printed volumes, as well as some manuscripts and maps, including Greek and Latin classical poets and authors, histories, and grammars and lexicons—the specialized library of a scholar. The bookplate for this collection is dated 1780, long after Icilius’s death, and so was most likely prepared especially to identify the collection within the Library, a demonstration of the value placed on it.

            Quintus Icilius’s epitaph, if it may be called that, was provided by Frederick in a letter to the monarch’s brother. He wrote, “Poor Quintus has just been carried off in the space of twenty-four hours. Thursday morning he had been at drill, and Saturday at one o’clock he was dead. This disturbs my domestic arrangements; but what can I do? One must be ready for everything in this world, and the longer one lives, the more one must suffer losses.”

Phillip A. Metzger

Graduate School of Library Science

The University of Texas at Austin