Library with a catalogue of famous members
Writers, from Darwin to McEwan, have been inspired by the shelves of the London Library, says Tristram Fane Saunders
The eccentric shelving system places the ‘Sex’ section between ‘Sewage’ and ‘Sheep’
Libraries are preparing to reopen tomorrow, with many struggling to adapt to the new one-metreplus rule. But concerns about social distancing are nothing new. In 1841, one library visitor was fed up with being wedged in shoulder-to-shoulder at the British Museum Library. “No man can read a book well with the bustle of three or four hundred people around him!” he wrote.
That disgruntled reader, the historian Thomas Carlyle, wanted a new kind of library, a place where he could browse the full collection in peace, and then do the impossible – actually take the books home for solitary reading. And so he created it, in a couple of rented rooms above a former gambling den. A few years later, it moved to a quiet corner of St James’s Square, where it has remained ever since.
While the British Museum Library has evolved into a world-famous behemoth, the British Library, most people haven’t heard of its smaller rival. And yet The London Library, which is also preparing to reopen tomorrow, has quietly changed the shape of modern literature.
It is the world’s largest private lending library, and some of the most famous books of the past two centuries were inspired by browsing in its shelves. A roll-call of famous past members could fill this page: Dickens, Darwin, Churchill, Kipling, Kubrick, Agatha Christie, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf, both Eliots (George and TS)… It’s impossible to keep track of them all. The current librarians only found out that Mark Twain was once a member when they stumbled across his joining card a couple of months ago. Twain signed up in the same year as HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle.
In 2018, the librarians discovered that notes scribbled in a book about Whitby slang came from the hand of
Bram Stoker; he had used it to research the Whitby scenes in
Dracula. Since the discovery, it has been moved to the “safe” section, home to the library’s most valuable treasures, but until recently – like almost everything on the library’s 17 miles of shelves – it was available for anyone to borrow. If you want to take their 1839 first edition of Nicholas
Nickleby home to read, you can. The ability to grab any book off the shelf on a whim is at the heart of the library’s identity, says its head of communications, Julian Lloyd. “This is not a museum – it’s a million books for borrowing.” It’s also a bustling literary community; though the library has fewer than 7,000 members, around 1,000 of them are writers of some kind. There have always been novelists (Ian McEwan, Jessie Burton) and historians (Simon Schama, Max Hastings), but recent years have brought a new wave of screenwriters. The London Library is where Deborah Davis researched her screenplay for last year’s Oscar-winner The Favourite, and where Daisy Goodwin writes the scripts for her ITV hit Victoria.
To Victoria Hislop, bestselling author of The Island, the building’s history is less interesting than the sense of a living “community” she feels when bumping into other writers there. “You see Tom Stoppard and just feel your heart melting with sheer joy that you’re in the same space.”
Kazuo Ishiguro, a long-time member, was browsing the library’s shelves when he chanced upon Harold Laski’s The Danger of Being a Gentleman – a book that inspired
Ishiguro to write The Remains of the
Day. That kind of lucky accident is made more likely by the library’s eccentric shelving system, invented by its former librarian Charles Hagberg Wright and (quite understandably) used nowhere else in the world. The “Science & Misc” section is particularly bonkers. There, books on funeral rites could be under either B for Burial, or C for Cremation. If you want Freud’s The Interpretation of
Dreams, it’s not in Psychology but in Dreams. It may be natural to find Wit & Humour after Wine, or to see Fools near Football, but one hardly expects to have Sex between Sewage and Sheep. The categories have changed over time: Computers is a new addition, and Pig-Sticking was reluctantly abolished when librarians realised there weren’t any books in it.
Another oddity is its extreme reluctance to throw anything away.
Most libraries regularly “deaccession” unborrowed books, but (aside from duplicate copies) the London Library hangs on to almost everything it’s ever had. To make room for this ever-growing hoard, the library has spread into half a dozen adjacent buildings – and even into the street, creating a reading room by covering an outdoor square with a glass roof – which are connected together in a kind of architectural conjuring trick. “It’s like a Tardis,” says Hislop. “You go in through a little corner building in the square, and yet once you’re inside it goes on and on.”
One reading room was designed by the architect of the Ritz, another won a Riba-award, and even the lavatories are works of art (they’ve been tiled by Turner Prize-winner Martin Creed). The only ugly place is the basement, where, at one characterless desk shoved into a dim corner, you’ll often see Bill Bryson hard at work. “He likes the seclusion,” says Lloyd.
Despite the library’s pursuit of quiet reflection, it has been shaken by drama. In 1875, after trying and failing to borrow Problems of Life and Mind,
Vol II (it was already out on loan), a young man called Bryan Courthope Hunt made it clear that he had plenty of problems of life and mind already, when he shot himself in the head – twice – in the magazine room. Carlyle’s reaction was reportedly one of annoyance: “Nice to think I can’t get my papers just because some confounded relative of Leigh Hunt has gone and shot himself.”
Another dramatic moment came in 1944, when a bomb burst through the roof. It didn’t go off, but still destroyed thousands of books, and prompted the library’s longest-ever period of closure – though the past three months have almost equalled it. Yet then, as now, for many members who never visit the library, the closure made no difference: it delivers books to readers who can’t pick them up in person.
Like many institutions, it’s had to introduce changes to cope with the “new normal” – a strict one-way system, pre-booked entry times, the need for books that have been touched to be “quarantined” for a few days before they’re reshelved. But in most respects, it’s reassuringly unchanged from Carlyle’s day.
One might object to the idea of a private library, but its independence – it is run entirely on donations and members’ fees – has allowed it to survive unchanged after years of cuts to public library services, and even to thrive at a time when so much of the arts world is fighting for survival. For EM Forster, looking at a world in crisis in 1941, it was a rare source of hope and comfort. The London Library “seems to be something more than a collection of books”, he wrote. “It is a symbol of civilisation. It is a reminder of sanity and a promise of sanity to come.”