Thank goodness for private libraries, says
Britain’s independent libraries are extraordinary survivors. Tanya Gold wishes the Morrab Library, Penzance, a happy 200th birthday
The Morrab Library, Penzance, lives inside a pale Victorian villa in subtropical gardens overlooking Mount’s Bay at the very end of England. If you step outside, you find yourself by a vast bush of rosemary and this is apt, because rosemary is for remembrance of the past. This year marks the library’s 200th anniversary.
Inside, in a series of slightly gloomy rooms – gloom, and big leather chairs, are essential to the lover of old libraries – you will find 55,000 volumes of history, biography, antiquities, topography, travel, an important collection of Cornish photographs and fiction; 2,750 of these volumes predate 1800.
I spend whole days here, going where the books compel me. I once spent a whole morning examining Victorian guidebooks to Penzance, and an afternoon looking for photographs of the old rookeries in Newlyn. It is warm and silent, but never boring; there is always a possibility that John Le Carré, who writes in a clifftop house nearby, will appear to consult a reference volume. When I found a notice pinned to the board, asking for a typist to assist someone ‘like John Le Carré’, I was certain the advertisement was actually from John Le Carré – classic tradecraft.
Private libraries – or subscription, or independent libraries – are an oddity left to us by long-dead book-lovers. There are only 29 of them in Britain, and they are often in strange places because their origins are arbitrary.
The library of the 17th-century philanthropist Thomas Plume, for instance, is in the tower of St Peter’s Church, Maldon, Essex, because he was baptised there. He left his collection of 8,000 books and pamphlets to be consulted by ‘any gentleman or scholar who desires’. The Innerpeffray Library, near Perth, was founded by the 3rd Lord Materdie in the 17th century when he left 400 books to the public. Other grandees followed his example, and gave books to the library, which
today is situated in an isolated house above the River Earn.
With the age of Enlightenment – and cheaper books – more libraries appeared, funded by subscription, and patronage. These libraries were literally built by book-lovers, page by page.
Bromley House Library was founded in 1816; its premises are a beautiful 1752 townhouse in Nottingham. The Portico Library in Manchester is in a Greek Revival pseudo-temple, and was founded by a group of businessmen in 1806, to specialise in fiction. These men knew how to live!
Sometimes the origin of the private library is arbitrary. The London Library in St James’s Square – the grandest British subscription library – was founded when Thomas Carlyle could not get a seat in the British Library’s reading room in the Great Court of the British Museum, and had to perch on a ladder instead. But Carlyle never liked the British Library; even when he did find a seat, he claimed that sitting close to other readers gave him a ‘museum headache’.
‘A book is a kind of thing that requires a man to be self-collected,’ he wrote. ‘He must be alone with it. A good book is the purest essence of the human soul. How could a man take it into a crowd, with bustle of all sorts going on around him?’
So, in 1841, he founded his own, and it is a library from a fairy tale; there is always a corner to hide in. It moved from 49 Pall Mall to its present home in 1845 and, behind its stately 1898 Portland stone façade, it is a labyrinth, with a million books and periodicals in metal stacks that go up, and down, and over, and beyond. You will never read all the books in the London Library, but it is comforting to know they are there.
Carlyle won his battle because his perfect library survives while the British Library Reading Room, where he perched on his ladder, became a disgusting ‘exhibition space’, café and shop, courtesy of Norman Foster in 2000, as if the new millennium would be an era of idiocy, which it is. Even the British Museum web page which describes the transformation is illiterate; the purpose, it says, was ‘to reopen the space to public’, whatever the hell that means.
The British Library now lives in an equally disgusting, bright orange building on the Euston Road, which is as conducive to contemplation as toothache. It looks like a branch of Tesco and it is full of university students studying Facebook on laptop computers. Only the King’s Library in the atrium, shuttered by glass – the king was George III – reminds one of what a library should feel like. But it is, explicitly, a relic – and a taunt.
Public libraries are closing and the remainder ‘diversify’ into public ‘spaces’, as if people did not have their living rooms, and their friends’ living rooms, to emote in. As William Cook has noted in these pages, public libraries offer Scrabble, bridge, computers, toddler time and singalongs – everything but the silence Carlyle longed for. Sometimes, the noisiest person in a public library is the librarian, which is insane. I suggest you buy yourself membership to a private library in 2018. For the privilege of dreaming at mine, I pay just £30 a year.