Our last visit of 2016 led us to
the London Library. Tucked away just a few minutes’ walk from the hustle and
bustle of Piccadilly on St. James’s Square, the London Library is what many
avid readers and librarians would most likely call their “dream library”.
Originally an old town house, extended over the decades to accommodate its
rapidly growing collections, the library is full of picturesque reading rooms
with old wooden furniture, comfortable armchairs and balustrades for, of
course, more books. It is also probably one of the only libraries that still
maintains its book lifts. The library opened in 1841 and was
envisioned by its founder, Scottish author, historian, and biographer
Thomas Carlyle, in contrast to the then often overcrowded and reference-only
British Museum Library. Carlyle wanted to create a subscription and lending
library where readers could join for a membership fee and read or study in a
tranquil, comfortable atmosphere as well as borrow books to read at home. Now members are able to read a vast
variety of over one million books, mainly on arts and humanities subjects, ranging
from the sixteenth century to the present day, across 2000 subjects and in 55
different languages with about 8000 new acquisitions made annually.
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| One of the book lifts in the London Library |
Caring for such a large and
historically significant collection while allowing most of it to be open access
and borrowed is no small task. So it seems appropriate that we were first
ushered to the conservation studio, where the team’s current project is to
implement preventative conservation techniques by packing old and fragile
books into specially made preservation boxes tailored to each book’s individual
size to prevent exposure to light, dust, pollution or other wear and tear.
Afterwards we were led to the Victorian grille-floored book stacks which run
over four floors and form part of the structure of one of the first
steel-framed buildings in London. Dating from the 1890s, they were a then
great innovation in the construction of libraries to aid with ventilation and
temperature control.
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| The Victorian Stacks of the London Library |
Here we were also introduced to
the library’s unique classification system, invented by Charles Hagberg Wright,
who was appointed as librarian of the London Library in 1893. He set out to aim
for a good balance between readers finding what they were interested in while
allowing for browsing and serendipitous finds. Some sections we found included:
a section for every King Charles you could think of, epigrams, and cheese. The
classification system was particularly interesting to me because the library in
which I am completing my Graduate Traineeship, the Warburg Library, has a
similarly idiosyncratic way of sorting its books. In the Warburg Library we talk about
the concept of the “good neighbour”, in which books are grouped to aid
researchers to serendipitously find the book they did not know they were
looking for and which could provide them with a key new insight into their
field.
While being led through the many rooms and floors of the library, including the
famous Victorian Reading Room, we encountered further interesting features. One
of them was the Small Books Cabinet, in which around 350 books measuring up to
5 inches tall are kept, so they do not disappear between their larger
companions. Another was the enormous, multi-volume bound catalogue (now
supplemented by a digital version) of the library and the so-called Times Room
in which the back runs of hundreds of
periodicals, including original copies of over 200 years of the Times newspaper
are stored.
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The Small Books
Cabinet
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While exploring the library’s
many corners, our guides illustrated the London Library’s history for us. The
London Library has had a lively history with many illustrious patrons and
readers to people it, including T.S. Elliot, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf
and other giants of the literary world, which gave the staff a rich canon
of narratives to pass on to us. One we were told was how T.S.
Elliot presented a hand-written manuscript of The Wasteland for auction to help fund the London Library to pay a tax bill from Westminster Council after it had been
incorrectly classed as a “gentlemen’s club” rather than an educational institution.
Another was about how library staff actually lived in the library during the
Second World War to be prepared for immediate on-site rescue action should the
library be bombed (as indeed it was in 1944 destroying over 16000 volumes). Its
history with its many eccentricities is part of the essential character of the
library and what makes it so appealing.
As a Library trainee from an
academic research library, it was very worthwhile seeing how a historic, independent
lending library differs in its nature, particularly in terms of its readership,
membership policy, collection policy and funding structure. Thank you to Amanda
Corp, Head of Enquiries, and Amanda Stebbings, Head of Member Services, for the tour and for answering our questions afterwards.
For more information on the London Library, you can visit
their website here: http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/
