LIBRARIES

Dr John Dee

John Dee estimated that he had 3000 printed books and a thousand manuscripts.

Dr Dee inspired both Marlowe's Faustus and Shakespeare's Prospero in The Tempest (c.1610).

In the correspondence between Queen Elizabeth I and John Dee, the latter was referred to as 007 .

Dr Dee's black obsidian mirror is in the British Museum.

Location: Mortlake High Street, SW14 8HW. From 1565 until 1584 and from 1589 until 1595 Dee lived in Mortlake.

The Destruction of The Monasteries

John Aubrey's Butterflies

The future biographer John Aubrey attended his first school in Leigh Delamere in Wiltshire. He noticed that the books were had coverings that had been manuscript pages. Prior to the Reformation these had been manuscripts in the libraries of the monasteries and priories. He described them as being being like butterflies through the air. A hundred years later it seems to me that they are still on the wing and I would net them if I could. It hurts my eyes and heart to see fragile painted pages used to line pastry dishes, to bung up bottles, to cover schoolbooks, or make templates beneath a tailor's scissors.

Duke Humfrey's Library

Humfrey Duke of Gloucester was a younger son of King Henry IV. He owned the Palace of Placentia, which stood on the site of what became Greenwich Palace. As a politician, he was a liability. However, historically his reputation was redeemed by his being a notable patron of scholarship.

By the late 14^thC there was an exhaustion amongst Western European scholars with the great texts of the 12^th and 13^thC. A vast number of commentaries had been written about them. People were looking for something new. The Arabs had preserved Classical Greek texts. Europe rediscovered these, notably new translations of Aristotelian texts. They contained ideas that challenged some of the Church's stances. Humanism emerged. Duke Humfrey's library was a conduit through which it entered England.

Location: The Palace of Placentia, Greenwich Park, SE10 9NN

The House of Commons Library

The M.P. and diarist Sir Henry Chips Channon noted that there is nowhere in the world where sleep is so deep as in the libraries of the House of Commons.

The Commons Library moved to the Derby Gate Building.

Location: 1 Derby Gate, SW1A 2DG

Website: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk

Lambeth Palace Library

Lambeth Palace Library is the library and record office of the Archbishops of Canterbury. It was founded in 1610 by Archbishop Richard Bancroft. When Tsar Peter the Great saw it he was astonished. He had had no idea that there were so many books in the world.

In 1996 the library received the early books collection of Sion College.

Location: 15 Lambeth Palace Road, SE1 7JT (red, brown)

See Also: TOWNHOUSES Lambeth Palace

Website: https://lambethpalacelibrary.org

The London Library

The London Library was founded in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle. The historian and man of letters desired that there should be an institution that would stock the type of books that commercial circulating libraries did not hold and which the British Museum library refused to lend out.¹ In 1845 the Library moved to its present-day premises.

Location: 14 St James's Square, SW1Y 4LG (orange, grey)

See Also: LITERATURE Thomas Carlyle

Website: www.londonlibrary.co.uk

¹. A further stimulus was a spat that he had had with the British Museum official Antonio Panizzi.

Joe Orton

As resting actors, Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell had large swathes of time to fill. Much of this they spent by trying to become published writers. However, they took to amusing themselves by borrowing copies of books from Islington Library. The pair would alter the volumes by altering the tomes illustrations so that they became surreal montages.

It was a statistical inevitability that a librarian would eventually see one of the couple's creations. In 1962 this happened and the library service used its reader records to mount an investigation to ascertain how much damage the pair had done. When the scale of it became apparent a decision was made that the men should be prosecuted. Orton and Halliwell were both convicted of theft and malicious damage. They were sent to different prisons. Orton took to writing on his own, which was something that he had not done before. It soon became apparent that, without Halliwell as his co-author, he had an original talent as a comic dramatist.

Following Orton's release, he soon established himself as one of the great talents of the 1960s. His plays included Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) and Loot (1965). Halliwell felt his own inability to achieve underscored by his boyfriend's success. Their relationship slowly disintegrated. Halliwell slipped into madness. He bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer and then committed suicide.

With the passage of the years Islington Library Service changed its attitude towards Orton. The books that he and Halliwell had defaced became some of its most treasured items.

Location: 25 Noel Road, Islington, N1 8HQ. The house that contained Orton and Halliwell's bed-sit. (purple, yellow)

See Also: MURDERS; THEATRE RELATED

Website: www.islington.gov.uk/libraries-arts-and-heritage/libraries www.islington.gov.uk/libraries-arts-and-heritage/heritage/islington/-museum

The Poison Shelves

In the 1950s many librarians regarded themselves as being the being the guardian of their communities morality. There were books, such as Nicholas Monserrat's (1910-1979) novel The Cruel Sea (1951), that the public wished to read that were not banned despite containing racy passages. These were stocked on the poison shelves .

Location: Lawn Road Flats, 3 Lawn Road, NW3 2XD. Monsarrat was a resident of the Isokon Building.

Public Libraries

The Public Library Act of 1850 enabled large boroughs to levy a special rate that would be dedicated to establishing local libraries.

Carnegie

Samuel Storey was a Sunderland businessman who entered the newspaper business in order to forward his radical political agenda. In July 1873 he and a number of associates launched the Sunderland Daily Echo. Storey ended up the sole proprietor. In 1881 he was elected a Liberal M.P. for Sunderland. His radical politics and his speeches in Parliament drew him to the attention of the Scottish-born American steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). The two men formed the Carnegie-Storey Newspaper Syndicate with the objective of buying up or starting newspapers in areas with large concentrations of working-class people and then using those platforms as a medium through which to broadcast a radical agenda.

Their radical platform was largely met by the 1884 passages of the Reform Act and the Redistribution Act. Radicalism as a political force in Britain went into decline. In 1885 Carnegie visited Britain and the Syndicate's members agreed to wind it up.

In 1892 several striking workers at the Homestead Steel Works were shot dead by guards. Andrew Carnegie's public reputation suffered as a result. He had been helping to finance libraries in Scotland and in Pittsburgh. From 1899 he expanded his munificence elsewhere.

Website: https://carnegielibrariesofbritain.com

John Passmore Edwards

The Passmore Edwards Limehouse District Public Library. On the southern side of Commercial Road, to the east of Norway Place.

Location: Shepherd's Bush Library (former), 7 Uxbridge Road, Shepherd's Bush, W12 8LJ

Website: https://thepassmoreedwardslegacy.org.uk

Peckham Library

In 1999 the Will Alsop-designed Peckham Library in south London opened.

Location: 122 Peckham Hill Street, SE15 5JR

Website: www.southwark.gov.uk/libraries/find-a-library?chapter=12

Tate Central Free Public Library

The Tate Central Free Public Library in Brixton was of the libraries that Henry Tate financed the construction of.

Whitechapel Library

Whitechapel Library was termed the university of the ghetto because of its heavy use by the local Jewish community. The poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) was closely associated with it. At one point the library housed Europe s largest collection of Yiddish books in Europe. It also had books in German. The building became part of The Whitechapel Gallery.

Location: 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX (purple, turquoise)

Idea Store Whitechapel, 321 Whitechapel Road, E1 1BU. Its successor. (red, turquoise)

Website: www.ideastore.co.uk/idea-store-whitechapel

The Wiener Library

The Wiener Library relocated from Berlin to London in 1939

Location: 29 Russell Square, WC1B 5DP (purple, red)

Website: https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org

Dr Williams's Library

Dr Williams's Library was founded in 1729.

The Library moved to Gordon Square in 1890.

Location: 14 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AR (blue, yellow)

Website: https://dwl.ac.uk

The Women's Library

Location: The L.S.E. Library, Lionel Robbins Building, The London School of Economics, 10 Portugal Street, WC2A 2HD (orange, red)

Website: www.lse.ac.uk/library/collection-highlights/the-womens-library

David Backhouse 2024