Towers of books in the Acquisitions office

There has been a huge amount of book ordering recently, including 225 new English titles on order this week alone! I suspect that I may well be able to build a small fort with all of the books that I am expecting to arrive next week. The life of an Acquisitions Assistant is never dull, or quiet!

There are now fewer than 100 days until the start of the London 2012 Olympics, so I have been keeping an eye out for sporting and London based books in particular, as well as the usual smattering of more bizarre titles.
Recent sporting titles entering the library include:

• “Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat: the science behind drugs in sport” Cooper, Chris (Oxford University Press, 2012)
• “CMJ: a cricketing life” Martin-Jenkins, Christopher (Simon & Schuster, 2012)
• “The Palgrave handbook of Olympic Studies” Lenskyj, Helen Jefferson – editor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
• “Sport under Communism: behind the East German ‘miracle’” Grix, Mike – editor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
• “Five ring circus: myths and realities of the Olympic Games” Shaw, Christopher A. (New Society Publishers, 2007)

To combine with the sporting books, I have also been keeping an eye out for London titles. These are:

• “London: a history in verse” Ford, Mark – editor (Harvard University Press, 2012) – this is on order, though is not due to be published until June
• “Lusting for London: Australian expatriate writers at the hub of Empire, 1870-1950” Morton, Peter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) – this is currently on order
• “Underground, Overground: a passenger’s history of the tube” Martin, Andrew (Profile, 2012) – this is on order, though not due to be published until May
• “Royal River: power, pageantry and the Thames” Starkey, David (Scala, 2012)
• “The London Square: gardens in the midst of town” Longstaffe-Gowan, David (Yale University Press, 2012)
• “Edwardian London through Japanese eyes: the art and writings of Yoshio Markino, 1897-1915” Rodner, William (Brill, 2011) – this is currently on order.

The bizarre and amusing titles that I have spotted this month are:

• “Bastards: politics, family, and law in Early Modern France” Gerber, Matthew (Oxford University Press, 2012)
• “The Ashgate research companion to monsters and the monstrous” Mittman, Asa Simon – editor (Ashgate, 2012)
• “Shame and honor: a vulgar history of the order of the garter” Trigg, Stephanie (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
• “Manure matters: historical, archaeological and ethnographic perspectives” Jones, Richard – editor (Ashgate, 2012) – this is currently on order
• “Testicles: balls in cooking and culture” Blandie, Vie (Prospect Books, 2011) – This arrived this morning, and I can confirm that it does indeed contain some recipes!

Topography stacks

With well over a million books, the sight of an empty shelf in The London Library is a rare thing. Yet members and visitors browsing the 1890s back stacks – home to our History, Science & Miscellaneous and Topography collections – will have noticed that at basement level, the bottom shelves have been bare for several months. Here we tell the story behind these lonely shelves and the great efforts of our Preservation and Stack Management (PSM) team to reunite them with their books.

Cockled paper under raking light

It is often said that water, rather than fire, poses the greatest threat to books. In the early hours of 22nd August 2011, a burst pipe caused flooding at basement level in the 1890s stacks, and we witnessed the devastating damage water can cause. The PSM and Support teams’ response was immediate and their efforts fantastic, using specialist water extractor machines and good old-fashioned buckets, wellingtons and hard-graft to rescue the books from the lower shelves – the first step in a long-process to restore, rebind or replace thousands of volumes.

Lower ground floor, 1890s stacks

Staff had to work very quickly to ensure damage limitation; it takes only 72 hours for mould growth to set in. A total of 3211 books were affected, the majority of which were sent to the document restoration service Harwell Document Restoration Service to be professionally frozen and dried. (The Library lacks the space and resources to properly dry more than about 100 books at a time.) Rapid freezing of wet materials has a stabilizing effect, preventing further damage and mould growth. They are then thawed and dried, either by vacuum freeze-drying or air-drying.

It was not only the books that needed to dry: it took five months before the wooden shelves that hold the collections, and the walls, were fully dry and suitable for use.

Books are now being returned to the Library in large crates – around 30 every two weeks – keeping our PSM team very busy! Members of the team, surrounded by crates and boxes and armed with expert knowledge of book conservation, assesses the damage to each book, deciding whether it will be re-shelved in its current condition, restored in-house by our Conservation team, sent away to be re-bound, or replaced.

It has been a cross-departmental effort, with Acquisitions ordering replacements, PSM repairing and re-shelving books, arranging for rebinding, and ensuring the shelves are ready for the return of the collection.

We are currently fundraising for Phase Three of the Library’s redevelopment programme, which will see the full refurbishment of the 1890s stacks – work that is vital to the long-term survival of the collections.

Xavier and Alice have already written about some of the tasks expected of us as graduate trainees, and I’m sure London Library regulars have become used to having us around the place on a day-to-day basis. A crucial part of our daily routine involves managing our own section of the shelves – in fact, each member of staff takes care of a particular section of the library to ensure the books are always in the right place. However, this is not merely a case of haphazardly putting books on shelves! As well as making sure the books are in the correct places for library members to find, we’re in charge of sending any damaged books to be repaired, ensuring that there is enough space on the shelves for returned books and generally making sure that the library is neat and tidy.

I’m in charge of part of third floor Biography, from Nei to T to be exact, and I have discovered that a daily shelving session can prove to be rather therapeutic. The London Library boasts an impressive Biography collection and one thing I love about my shelving section is the sheer amount of knowledge and the experiences that are held on the shelves. George Orwell’s diaries sit in the same aisle as Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for thought, there are over fifty different editions of Samuel Pepys’ letters and diaries and Sir Walter Scott has a number of shelves all to himself. The list of well-known names includes the likes of Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dylan Thomas, Margaret Thatcher, Wilfred Owen; the list could go on and on. The volumes housed in the Biography section consist of works by the people themselves such as memoirs and journals, letters and correspondence and are often accompanied by biographies written by others.

The excellent thing about this section of the library is the very personal nature of the sources housed there. Could Pepys have predicted that people would still be reading his diaries over 300 years after they were written? Many of the decisions and actions taken by the people in Biography shaped the world we live in today, so I am pleased that the London Library takes great care to ensure that these books are preserved and the experiences of others continue to be documented and remembered.

An 1842 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Poems (originally published in 1830, when Tennyson was just 20 years old) from the Library’s English Literature collection, contains the enchanting poem Mariana – a melancholic exploration of isolation and rejection. Tennyson was appointed President of the Library in 1855, a post he served until his death in 1892.

The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes and Mary Ann Evans (better known as George Eliot) were living in what the writer John Wells called “high-minded adultery” at the time of their membership of the Library. An 1842 edition of Middlemarch, discovered in the Library’s Fiction collection, explores with a critical eye the concept of marriage…

Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than – than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone. George Eliot, Middlemarch

Many new members first discover The London Library via member A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession – the plot of which centres around the discovery of secret letters by the character Roland Michell in the Library’s Reading Room – certainly a romantic setting for such a discovery.

T. S. Eliot – appointed President of the Library in 1952, serving until his death in 1965 – made a rare public declaration of the deep affection he felt for his second wife Esmé Valerie Fletcher in “A Dedication to My Wife”.

Beyond the works of our past and present members, you’re sure to be romantically inspired when browsing the tomes shelved under ‘S. Love’ in the Library’s 1890s stacks. Reflections, musings, collected love letters and words of advice for the heartbroken await discovery, nestled between shelfmarks ‘S. Lotteries’ and ‘S. Machinery’, with the charms of ‘S. Laughter’ nearby.

Arnold Haultain's Hints for Lovers, 1909, offers words of wisdom for Lovers, Courtship, Men, Women and Kissing...

... and Girard de Propiac's Dictionnaire D'Amour, published in Paris in 1808, guides us through the language of love

In Love and the English, Nina Epton explores the history of love, lust and marriage in England from the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Ages to the 20th century, questioning as she does the “cliché that Englishmen make poor lovers”. (Love and the English by Nina Epton, 1960)

Finally, the intriguing dialogues in Doris Langley Moore’s The Techniques of a Love Affair - including “advice for the confession of former gallantries” – are worthy of consideration!

Now that the Christmas and New Year break are firmly behind us, here in Acquisitions we have pretty much caught up with all of our book ordering. This means I’m drowning in piles of new books on an almost daily basis, all wanting to go out on the New Books shelves and be borrowed by keen Libary members.

I’m also spending what seems like a vast amount of time tracking and chasing un-received books, the majority of which have had their publication dates changed. Some of these are now due in 2013, though one I have come across has had its publication date changed from 2009 to 2021! We won’t be holding our breath for that one, then.

With Dickens in mind, I have kept an eye on the fiction that the Library has been ordering recently, of which there seems to be quite a bit. Those that have either arrived of late or are on order include:

“The Art of Fielding” Harbach, Chad (a debut novel)
“Landfall” Gordon, Helen
“In the Orchard, the Swallows” Hobbs, Peter
“An Honourable Man” Slavo, Gillian
“Parallel Stories” Nadas, Peter
“It’s Fine by Me” Petterson, Per
“Jack Holmes and his friend” White, Edmund
“The Afrika Reich” Saville, Guy
“Married Love” Hadley, Tessa
“The Third Reich” Bolano, Roberto
“Pure” Miller, Andrew (winner of the Costa Prize)
“Mountains of the Moon” Kay, I. J
“Pacazo” Kesey, Roy
“All is Song” Harvey, Samantha

Plenty of fresh and exciting reading to keep fiction fans occupied until my next update! And now, back to dealing with yet another parcel of wonderful new books…

Highlights of the Science & Miscellaneous stacks include Love, Imaginary Histories, Birdcatching and Conjuring! As a special festive treat, we have been browsing S. Christmas and are delighted to bring you a selection of highlights from our yuletide collections! From ‘The History of The Christmas Card’ to ‘Christmas and Christmas Lore’, there’s plenty of festive-themed reading to be done!

Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan by Clement A Miles, 1913

Christmas Eve - The Romance of Christmas by Kenneth Ingram, 1924

Christmastide by W. Sandys, 1852

The Christmas Festivities - from Christmastide by W. Sandys, 1852

A Book of Christmas Verse - Selected by H. C. Beeching, 1926

Here, Alice looks to the wonderful Science & Miscellaneous stacks for festive inspiration and enlightens readers on ‘how to make a dish of snow!’

D Day. D for dreadful, devastating, defining, daunting Deadline Day. Dramatic? Perhaps. But the application for UCL’s Library School is the first of many within our Graduate Trainee year, and has therefore monopolised most of November with its pressing insistence. Complete me! Perfect me! The application itself is fairly straightforward: histories of employment and education, references. The bit that is most taxing is, as always, the personal statement, or why do I want to be a librarian? Why indeed?

Libraries have always been an integral part of my life; from a young age, I would visit and take advantage of the facilities on offer: story times, homework help, and later, academic resources. The unwavering support and enthusiasm of the librarians I encountered, not to mention their ability to seek out answers and deliver information has always inspired me… I believe in the importance of libraries, their ability to transform lives and open up opportunities. I want to become a librarian in order to share these doors and windows with future generations.

Though if truth be told fully, I actually enjoy helping people and the challenge of information searching. Oh, and I love books, but as every applicant loves books, that statement would be horrifically redundant. Wish us luck…

***

Now for something slightly more seasonal, shelfmark S. Christmas (honestly, you’d think that the Trainees do nothing else bar rummage around the stacks looking for oddities the way we go on!). Let us hark back to the days when Christmas did come “suddenly and without warning” (Ingram 1924), instead of appearing the moment the Hallowe’en moon wanes in the garish form of foil and flashing Father Christmases. Advent nights at the London Library would be perfect with Howell’s A Spotless Rose haunting through the stacks in the cold, dark winter, the wind whistling through the windows, curled up in a Reading Room chair completely lost in a good book.

I thought I’d share with you a recipe taken from A Christmas Book (Original recipe from A Book of Cookerie, 1594). If any readers would like to test it, please share your opinions and photographs (I would myself, but lactose intolerance makes it somewhat restrictive). It won’t poison you… I hope!

To Make a Dish of Snow

Take a pottle of sweet thick Cream, and the white of eyght Egs, and beate them into your cream with a dishfull of Rosewater, and a dishfull of Sugar withal, then take a sticke and make it clene, and then cut it in the end foursquare, and make therewith beat all the aforesaid things together, and ever as it ariseth take it off, and put it in to a Cullender, this done, take a platter and sette an Apple in the midst of it, stick a thicke bush of Rosemary in the Apple. Then cast your Snow upon the Rosemary and fill your platter therewith, and if you have wafers cast some withal, and so serve them forthe.

References
Ingram, K. 1924 The Romance of Christmas, Society of SS. Peter and Paul Ltd, London
Lewis, W. and Heseltine G. C. 1931 A Christmas Book, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, London

While we won’t ordinarily be using the blog to talk about things we have for sale, we thought now was a good time to share some ideas that might help with those festive gift quandaries. With everything from stocking fillers to the exceptionally generous gift of Library membership, we have something for most budgets. Book lovers will be thrilled with a London Library gift, and you will have the satisfaction of having purchased from a registered charity.

Here are our top Christmas ideas for the bibliophiles in your life:

• Canvas bags – strong, sturdy, stylish and perfect for heavy books! 100% cotton, available with short or long handles.
• Pencils and notebooks – our A4 soft-cover notebooks and black pencils (featuring quotes by 5 distinguished past London Library members) make excellent stocking fillers.
• Membership Gift vouchers – The perfect way to help someone purchase London Library membership, Gift Vouchers can be used as full or part payment towards the cost of an annual or life membership. Available in denominations of £50 or £100.
• Gift membership – the ultimate treat for any bibliophile, London Library Gift Membership provides access to 1 million books on 15 miles of open shelving, electronic resources and much more. A very special gift indeed!

You can purchase London Library merchandise and Gift Membership online or in person at the Library – just ask at Reception.

Merry Christmas and happy shopping!

The posts by Carley, Alice and Xavier have already provided London Library blog readers with a great introduction into the world of a Graduate Trainee at The London Library. So much so that I was struggling to find inspiration for my first post!

As the job title suggests, the three of us current trainees are recent graduates from different universities across the country, and the subjects we studied provided us with an excellent foundation to complement the large arts and humanities collection housed here in the library. Alice studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Manchester University, Xavier studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and I thoroughly enjoyed my three years at Teesside University studying for a History degree. My love of history has resulted in me developing a particular soft spot for the Library’s History section, spread across Levels 2, 3 and 4 in the famous ‘Back Stacks’. This section boasts a wide variety of shelfmarks such as: H. England, Kings and Queen; H. Goths (not the kind wearing PVC and black lipstick); right through to exotic locations such as H. Schleswig-Holstein and H. Zululand.

Whilst exploring the History section, I came across the shelfmark: H. Imaginary Hist. and was suddenly hit with inspiration. I realise that many historians would balk the concept of counterfactual history, and I must admit I would probably be of the same mindset. Is it productive to spend time musing over what would have happened if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded? Or if the Brighton bomb had killed Margaret Thatcher in 1984? (See What might have been: leading historians on twelve ‘what ifs’ of history, edited with an introduction by Andrew Roberts; who is himself a Library member, appropriately enough.) Personally, I would disagree with this school of thought, but as human beings we can’t help but rely on hindsight and wonder if certain decisions or chains of events would have resulted in things turning out differently.

The Imaginary History shelfmark, tucked away in our lovely Back Stacks

The notion of ‘what might have been’ also made me wonder what would happen if there was no London Library. What if Thomas Carlyle had never decided to create an alternative to the British Library with an extraordinary emphasis on making the collection available on open shelves? Or, worse still, what if the London Library had been reduced to rubble when it was hit by the Blitz during the Second World War?  What if there hadn’t been a team of staff dedicated to the preservation of the London Library’s collection over the last 170 years? As a relative newcomer to the library profession, and as someone who wishes to pursue a long and hopefully fruitful career in this field, my traineeship here has made me consider the importance of places like The London Library, and libraries in general, to assist in the preservation of the printed word. We hear horror stories about the closure of public libraries and the ‘Google Generation’ relying on the internet to find the answers they need. However, the optimist in me firmly believes that the digital age will only serve to enhance the provision of our libraries, and that books and periodicals can survive in harmony alongside a growing number of e-resources and new technologies. I’m positive that The London Library has at least another 170 years left in it, if not longer!

When we started The London Library blog, we had in mind the idea of asking some of our members and supporters to act as ‘guest bloggers’ from time to time, giving their thoughts and insights on all things London Library. But who would be our first special guest?

Never was the adage ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’ more apt than when applied to Stephen Fry. Novelist, journalist, actor, director, television presenter, technology buff, comedian – or, as he chose to describe his occupation on his London Library application form in 1993, ‘Writer/Actor/Nuisance’ – Stephen must be one of the busiest men in Britain. He is also a true London Library devotee, and when asked to find time in his hectic schedule for a spot of extra blog writing, he agreed with typical alacrity and kindness.

Nuisance? Never.

The resulting blog is classic Fry: a discursive journey through why he loves London, why the area around St James’s Square is so fascinating and charming, and why The London Library is such a glorious London secret.  He sums the Library up beautifully when he says that ‘what gyms can do for your body, this magical place can do for your mind.’

We may be a secret now, but we want everyone to know about The London Library and to think about becoming a member. Stephen has not only blown our cover in the loveliest possible way, he has posted the entire piece on his website where his many fans and followers can read all about us.

He is a hard act to follow, but we look forward to bringing you more guest bloggers very soon.

In the meantime: enjoy reading this brilliant first instalment, and thank you so very much, Mr Fry. We’ll see you in the book stacks again soon!