By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
Frederic Charles Cook (1804-1889) was not originally from Devon. He was born in Hampshire, studied at Cambridge and Bonn, was ordained in 1839, and subsequently worked in London in various roles, including as Chaplain-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria. He became a Canon of Exeter Cathedral in 1864 and Precentor in 1872. Incidentally, he and his wife had no children but his niece by marriage, Jessie Anne Douglas Montgomery (1851-1918), was remarkable: a local activist for women’s education, governor of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum College, and first secretary of the Exeter Branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.
Cook died here in Exeter in 1889 and left his personal library of books to the Exeter Cathedral Library. Cook wasn’t bothered about fine bindings or first editions. However, he was a keen linguist and is said to have been acquainted with 52 languages. I can well believe it. There are nearly 2,000 books in the Cook Collection, including about 240 bibles in a mind-boggling number of languages, including Arabic, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Norwegian, Ojibwa, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Tsimshian, Turkish, Urdu and Wendish. Many were published by SPCK (the third oldest publishing house in the country), and the British and Foreign Bible Society.
Cook’s collection is of its time when the spread of Christianity went hand in hand with the growth of the British Empire. It hasn’t been especially well-used and, though the books have been expertly catalogued and are searchable on our online catalogue, they haven’t always been easy to locate on the shelves. I won’t bore you with the intricacies of library collection management but, over the past year, I have been working alongside our library volunteer, Elizabeth, to assign every book an individual number, and to make sure damaged or vulnerable books are protected. Our project is now complete. I hope Cook’s collection will interest researchers but anyone with an interest in languages will find it fascinating. If you fancy reading a favourite Bible passage in Malagasy or Maori, you know where to come!