Issue 17

AUTUMN 2012 / ISSUE 17 £3.50

M A G A Z I N E

A WINTER EDENPoet Nick Drake on an Arctic journey where nature, art and science collided

LITERARy socIETyNicolas Barker celebrates the bicentenary of a club for the most devoted of bibliophiles

oTToMANIAJason Goodwin tracks down an array of Ottoman treasures in the stacks

THE GREAT PERFoRMERClaire Tomalin on the complex life and prodigious energy of Charles Dickens

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

p

FROM THE CHAIRMAN

CONTRIbuTORs

bEHIND THE bOOK The administrators of the British Empire were compensated for the challenges they faced with rich material for writing about their experiences, as Stephanie Williams discovered

bIblIOTHERApy The reference book offers therapeutic solace for Anthony Thwaite when he is suffering from writer’s block

A WINTER EDENA poetic response to the climate-change threat facing the beautiful and rapidly changing Arctic landscape, by Nick Drake

THE ROXbuRGHE ClubNicolas Barker traces the fascinating history of the oldest society of bibliophiles in the world

HIDDEN CORNERsJason Goodwin picks out the Ottoman jewels of the Library’s collections

THE lONDON lIbRARy ANNuAl lECTuRECharles Dickens’s biographer, Claire Tomalin, on the man, his life and work

MEMbERs’ NEWs

EATING OuT

Poet Nick Drake travelled with a group of artists, writers, architects and scientists around the Svalbard archipelago, invited to record their responses by the arts climate-change organisation Cape Farewell.

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22Jason Goodwin’s search for Ottoman Empire titles among the Library stacks led to a wide-ranging and pleasurable ramble that took in titles from the 1673 edition of Sandwich schoolmaster Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turks in the Safe to Emmeline Lott’s 1866 memoirs, The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople, in T. Egypt.

25Claire Tomalin delivered the London Library Annual Lecture at the Hay Festival in June. This extract from her lecture on Charles Dickens focuses on Dickens’s personality, formative childhood years and the significance of F.R. Leavis’s views of Dickens’s work, which influenced a generation of readers.

Two hundred years ago the Roxburghe Club, a group of ‘enthusiastic and resolute Bibliomaniacs’, was formed. Created during the sale of the great library of John Ker, the 3rd Duke of Roxburghe, it still thrives today. Nicolas Barker conveys the passion and enthusiasms of his fellow members.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE / ISSuE 17

CONTENTS

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Magdalenefjord in Svalbard.

John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe (detail), 1761, by Pompeo Batoni (Floors Castle).

Coloured frontispiece from John Foster Fraser’s Pictures from the Balkans (1906).

Charles Dickens, c.1867–8.

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AdvertisingJane Grylls 020 7300 5661Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658Hannah Jackson 020 7300 5675Development Office, The London LibraryLottie Cole 020 7766 4716Aimée Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734

Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim JennerEditor Mary ScottDesign and ProductionCatherine Cartwright

Editorial CommitteeDavid BreuerLottie Cole Aimée Heuzenroeder Peter ParkerErica Wagner

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 14 September 2012 © 2012 The London Library. The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

It is time for my annual usurpation of the Librarian’s space in the Magazine, coinciding with our preparation of the Library’s Annual Report. I am glad to say that it contains good news – the Library ended the financial year with another small surplus to add to our reserves, this time without any help from legacies or pension adjustments – but should you prefer not to plough through the whole thing, I hope you will find the briefer analysis and explanation in Members’ News (pages 28–30) of interest.

It is especially heartening to see the Library’s membership numbers stabilising or even gently rising, despite these difficult economic times. The trustees are grateful for the members’ help in recruiting new members, for which assistance the £50 discount from the annual fee still applies.

Since the financial year ended, the Library has received a number of generous donations. These have served two important purposes: they have kicked off our efforts to rebuild the endowment fund that in the past was a vital support; and they have made it possible to move on to the next stage of the development programme, which will be the refurbishment of our wonderful Reading Room. Subject to planning consents, we expect this to begin early in 2013; more information on this much-needed work will appear in the next issue of the Magazine. As that room is, in its way, a temple to books, it is apt that this issue also contains a history by Nicolas Barker of the Roxburghe Club, that noble gathering of bibliophiles. The piece includes the fact that it was the auction next door, at no.15 St James’s Square, of the most prized possession of the 3rd Duke of Roxburghe’s library in 1812 that brought the club into existence. Anthony Thwaite tells us of the therapy that can come from reference books, no doubt in that very Reading Room. And, continuing the historical theme, all who missed Claire Tomalin’s London Library lecture at Hay on one of our earliest members – Charles Dickens – can find an excerpt from it printed here.

Finally, let me draw your attention to the notice, enclosed with this Magazine, with details of the AGM on 6 November 2012. I hope to see many of you joining us for a glass of wine in the Issue Hall beforehand, and then for an as usual lively meeting.

Bill EmmottChairman

fROM THE CHAIRMANp

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to [email protected]

On the coverPalmettes and cartouches (detail)Turkey (Iznik), 1560–70.

A group of three polychrome underglaze-painted tiles, each with a design of trefoil cartouches filled with split-leaf arabesques against a white ground. Each tile has an identical design, which when joined with the other two tiles produces a continuous border pattern. The tiles are linked below by the wave-like meander that surges rhythmically above a solid band of turquoise contained within black lines at the bottom edge of the tiles.

Courtesy of Simon Ray, London.

Reading the Library’s Annual Report

The Library’s Annual Report for 2011–12 will be downloadable as a pdf from the About Us section of the website from late September.If you would like a hard copy of the Report to be posted to you, please request one by emailing [email protected] or telephoning the Development Office on 020 7766 4719.

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6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Claire Tomalin jOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1965

Claire Tomalin has received many awards for her books. In 1991 the NCR, the james Tait Black and the Hawthornden prizes were all given to The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens; and in 2002 Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self was awarded the Whitbread Biography Award and made Whitbread Book of the Year. Her book, Dickens: A Life (2011), was shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Biography Award.

CONTRIBUTORS

Anthony Thwaite jOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2011

Anthony Thwaite published his first collection of poems in 1953, his Collected Poems in 2007, and Late Poems in 2010. As one of Philip Larkin’s chosen literary executors, he has edited Larkin’s Collected Poems, Selected Letters, Further Requirements and, most recently, Letters to Monica. He has been a literary editor of journals, and in 1990 was awarded the OBE for services to poetry. In 2011 he became a life member of the Library.

Stephanie Williams jOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1986

Born in Canada, Stephanie Williams took a degree in history before becoming a journalist. In 2005 she published Olga’s Story, a memoir of her Russian grandmother, which involved ten years of research in Siberia and China. Her book, Running the Show, published in paperback in February 2012, was inspired by the discovery of an 1879 questionnaire that revealed the extraordinary variety of conditions under which British governors and their families lived around the globe.

Nick Drake jOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1986

The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe,1999) won the Waterstone’s/ Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe, 2012) is his latest collection, including poems featured in United Visual Artists’ High Arctic installation at the National Maritime Museum (2011). He wrote the screenplay for Romulus, My Father (2007) and is currently adapting William Dalrymple’s book White Mughals (2002) for film. (nickfdrake.com)

Nicolas Barker jOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1971

Nicolas Barker is currently Editor of the Book Collector (since 1965) and has been Vice-President of the London Library since 2005. His many publications include The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning (1978), Horace Walpole’s Description of the Villa at Strawberry Hill (2010) and The Roxburghe Club: A Bicentenary History (2012).

Jason Goodwin jOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1980

jason Goodwin’s Ottomania was kindled when he walked to Istanbul in 1990; On Foot to the Golden Horn won the john Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He subsequently wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire (1998). His Istanbul-based series of historical thrillers began with The Janissary Tree, winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Novel. His books have been translated into more than 40 languages; the latest is An Evil Eye (2011).

Stage right: the very rare playbill for a pantomime featuring the famous Italian clown Joseph Grimaldi, 1820.

This was one of two Grimaldi pantomimes seen by Charles Dickens as a young boy in the winters of 1819 and 1820 – he clapped with ‘great precocity’ at the ‘ten thousand million delights’ of Grimaldi’s performances. Later, in 1837, while writing Oliver Twist, Dickens edited (heavily) Grimaldi’s Memoirs, and recalled the experience.

To create your own memories, please call on us:

BERNARD QUARITCH Ltd.Antiquarian Booksellers since 184740 South Audley St.London W1K 2PR

[email protected]

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Digging, Squatting and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia by Mrs Dominic Daly (London 1887). T. Australia, Central &c. A splendid account of the hardships endured in founding today’s Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory, by the daughter of its first Goverment Resident from 1870, Captain William Bloomfield Douglas. She describes the problems the tiny community encountered: infestations by crocodiles, tortuous heat, little fresh water and no fresh food; being constantly shadowed by Aborigines, and torrentially flooded during ‘the Wet’ . When gold was discovered, the tiny settlement was overwhelmed by crowds of dubious ‘diggers’ who introduced malaria. Coomassie: The Story of the Campaign in Africa 1873–4 by Henry M. Stanley (London 1896). H. Ashantee Campaigns; The March to Coomassie by G.A. Henty (London 1874). Mod. These two famous journalists did more than any other writers to fuel the Victorian popular imagination with a vision of imperial adventures, and a ‘Boys’ Own’ gloire of Empire. Here they give racy accounts of the British military campaign on the Gold Coast commanded by the legendary Sir Garnet Wolseley – the ‘Modern Major General’ – which brought the Gold Coast, now Ghana,

into the Empire. Life of Sir John Hawley Glover by Elizabeth Rosetta Glover (London 1897) Biog. Glover. Glover, an ex-naval commander, was the second Governor of Lagos. Sympathetic to the people, a passionate fighter of slavery, disciplined and hard-working, he ruled by sheer force of personality. The book is a wonderful portrait of the ideal of the dedicated, swashbuckling governor, written by his wife. Verandah: Some Episodes in the Crown Colonies, 1867–1889 by James Pope-Hennessy (London 1964). Biog. Hennessy. A grandson’s entertaining account of the extraordinary career of the man who was reputedly the model for Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn. Handsome, vain, dapper and impetuous, Governor Hennessy displayed a splendid talent for creating dissension wherever he went, provoking riots and resignations, while officials in London lay helpless before his charm. Audrey Tennyson’s Vice-Regal Days: The Australian Letters of Audrey Lady Tennyson to her Mother, Zacyntha Boyle, 1899–1903, ed. Alexandra Hasluck (Canberra 1978). Biog. Tennyson. As the wife of Lord Tennyson’s eldest son, Hallam, Audrey Tennyson was living quietly in the shadow of the great poet on the Isle of Wight when her husband

was unexpectedly invited to become the Governor of South Australia. At the age of 45, she found herself elevated to the very public role of Governor’s lady, based in far away Adelaide. Audrey wrote more than 260 voluminous letters to her mother. Breathless and frank, they are full of domestic detail and descriptions of how it felt to be a governor’s wife. Glimpses of a Governor’s Life by Sir Henry Hesketh Bell (London 1946). Biog. Bell, Hesketh.A novelist and amateur inventor with a keen eye for the absurd, Bell was immensely proud of the mock-Tudor Government House he built in his role as one of the first governors of Uganda. Bell like to think of himself as an entertaining writer – and he is. The book is full of anecdotes and descriptions that bring to life the attitudes, trials and amusements of the late Victorian colonial administrator. Aucuparius: Recollections of a Recruiting Officer by Ralph Furse (London 1962). Biog. Furse. A fascinating insight into the personalities, internal operations and ways to promotion in the Colonial Office in the first half of the twentieth century, by the department’s head of recruitment in Whitehall. If you want to know who was running the Empire and how they were chosen, this book is an essential starting point.

Looking for tales of derring-do as the British Empire reached its height under Queen Victoria? Vivid accounts of wars and pioneering, exploration and what it took to run the Empire are all to be found in the Library. There wasn’t much to do on long sultry evenings in the tropics, and many British administrators and their wives turned their hands to writing about their experiences.

Stephanie Williams unearthed some fascinating and often eccentric titles on the British Empire during her research for her book, Running the Show: Governors of the British Empire (published in paperback in February 2012)

BOOkBEHIND THE

‘ ’Stephanie Williams’s Running the Show (2011), 2012 edition.

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BIBLIOTHERAPY


I find there are moods and times, sometimes extended ones, when it is difficult to write poems, or even to read poetry or fiction. I don’t know why this should be so, but I know that at those times there can be the solace, or therapy, of reference books. Large-scale dictionaries are marvellous for this. We have a complete set of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary, 12 volumes, bought second-hand from Blackwell’s in Oxford many years ago, and browsing through them almost always cheers me up and entertains me. They are also useful for playing the ‘dictionary game’ , in which four or more people are drawn into giving a definition of a word, only one of which is the true definition. I am never seccatored (obs., rare) by the OED.

The therapeutic value of reference books has even been celebrated in recent fiction. David Lodge’s narrator

to those Who’s Who-type books are the various Companions, such as the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, ranging from Lascelles Abercrombie to Fay Zwicky.

But most of all, I think, I enjoy sinking into a work I don’t possess but which I consult almost every time I come into the London Library: the Dictionary of National Biography, particularly in its most recent manifestation – volume after volume in that handsome blue-and-gold stout binding, in which are enshrined many centuries of lives, not all of them great and by no means all of them good, but altogether a wonderfully rich tapestry of facts and oddities and achievements.

Our local university library bought the complete set of the new DNB several years ago, and had it available on its reference shelves. But recently, when I looked for it in vain, I was told it had all been transferred to the archives, where one would have to reserve a particular volume in advance before being able to consult it. No one could explain the reason for this crass decision.

With all these reference books, I love to hold and handle them, so that I am in full control. We have only recently entered the twenty-first century by acquiring an iPad (our introduction, in fact, to computers) and, amazing though this device is, it can’t compare with the reader-friendly feel – and range – of reference books. Not only that, but in my experience the accuracy of information on the internet can be unreliable. Long live the solidity and availability of the reference book, to which I can have healing recourse when I feel too null and dull even to think of writing a poem.

When the poet Anthony Thwaite finds himself short of inspiration, he turns to the solid reassurance of the reference book for consolation

Laurence Passmore in his novel Therapy (1995) finds it helpful to look up such words as ‘angst’ and ‘existentialism’ in a ‘paperback dictionary of modern thought’ . I know what he means.

The various types of Who’s Who are also good for comfort-reading, when nothing much seems to be going on in the poem-writing area – everything from the mysteriously brief (people who are very likely, one feels, to be senior figures in MI5 or MI6) to the self-indulgently long, complete with terrible recreations (for example the late James Kirkup’s ‘standing in shafts of sunlight’). Many years ago I composed a set of rhyming couplets drawn from such a reference book (the title is ‘On Consulting “Contemporary Poets of the English Language”’), which has had a curious sort of afterlife in that

Christopher Ricks put this doggerel in his Oxford Book of English Verse

(1999). Related

FOR PERsONAL REFERENcE

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A WinterEDEN

Nick Drake’s memorable journey into the ‘dream world’ of the Arctic was an encounter with danger, the sublime and the consequences of climate change

It was a bright, silent Saturday in September at the very top of the Svalbard archipelago. We were no more than 600 miles from the North Pole. Ted, the taciturn Dutch captain, shimmied up the mast and peered into the distance. We had planned to sail south through Hinlopenstretet, between the main island of Spitzbergen to the west and the even more ice-bound Nordaustlandet, to the north-east. But the weather had been against us, and we were now going to sail north again, out of the strait.

What was I doing here? I was one of a lucky group of 20 artists, theatre makers, architects, composers, writers and (crucially) scientists, invited by the Cape Farewell project to sail around Svalbard aboard the Noorderlicht, a nineteenth-century metal-hulled ship, with the intention of exploring climate change in this most vulnerable ecosystem. Like a dream world, Svalbard amazed at both the scale of the enormous and ancient (glaciers, fjords, mountains) and the tiny and transient (the glorious miniature wonderland of

the summer tundra). It was the end of the Arctic summer: the days were long and still, darkness was brief, and the sun took hours to set. Each morning, we walked the shoreline and around as much of the interior as we could access. And it was beautiful; light flew into the eye from every direction, reflected, amplified and refracted by water, ice and sky. Silence ruled – in the moments when we stopped walking and talking, it unfolded for miles all around us. We were made aware of the need for extreme vigilance against polar bears, and to leave as little trace as possible of our presence.

Now it was time for us to start the journey back down the west coast to the town of Longyearbyen. We set sail, but the wind was coming up, and soon we found ourselves passing through pristine pack ice the size of juggernauts, decorated with polar bear tracks, which the Noorderlicht easily shunted aside. Quickly, the open water was becoming a field of broken white ice. I was standing at the stern, and as I watched, like the calculated teeth and jaws of a bank vault, the pack ice suddenly closed around us. We were stuck fast. Ted revved the engine, but we were trapped in its grip. Everything became very still. The ice was white and blue, jostling and jolting, sending peaks and shears into the air. Ted looked really worried. He had barely spoken during the two weeks of the voyage, but now he muttered, ‘Oh, shit, ’ and ran down to the radio to summon the emergency services.

Normally, there are daily ice maps,

which would have shown this change of state. But it was Saturday and ice maps are not updated at the weekend. Ted realised we were being driven towards submerged rocks. We were told to put on all our warm clothing, bring our passports, and leave everything else behind. I stood in the tiny cabin; framed by the mirror. I looked like a performer in a fat suit of all my waterproof thermal kit, cast in a melodrama (‘abandon ship!’) that was suddenly, impossibly, turning out to be a little too real.

Back on deck, we stared out over the white ice field wondering what was going to happen. And then, suddenly, someone said: ‘polar bear. ’ There he was, staring back at us. With slow, loping grace, he paced from floe to floe exactly in our direction; closer, we saw his small dark eyes under wide black brows set in yellow-white fur. He passed within 50 feet of the prow. Andrei, our Russian guide, stood ready with his flare gun and a rifle over his shoulder. But the bear seemed merely tired, and with an indiscreet yawn he settled down on a nearby floe, resting his head on his paws like a dog before a fire, as if waiting to see what would happen next.

To add to the freakishness of the unfolding drama, a female polar bear with cub was spotted further away; were they converging? Did they scent a smorgasbord of climate-change artists and scientists? We scanned the empty skies, and prepared to be airlifted, like so many Peter Pans and Tinkerbells in a West End play, up into the belly of the rescue helicopter. But then, as if

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EDEN

in response to the impending disaster of the situation, the ship made a little surge ahead; the ice suddenly seemed less certain, as if it had changed its mind, and decided to let us go. The engine built up a head of speed; we swatted the floes aside with mere crashes and shudders, and within ten minutes we were in the glory of wide-open water. The helicopter appeared in the sky, circled to check on our situation, and then headed back into the icy clouds, leaving us alone again.

We ate dinner that night with the appetite of survivors, with the relish of victors. We toasted the captain. We celebrated our happy ending. But our brush with the Arctic sublime also reminded us we were in a place of confronting danger; perhaps I was imagining it, but the way the ice closed against us had looked like a destructive urge. It had looked deliberate. In any other century, it would have been a disaster. But we were protected by modern p

Opposite The Noorderlicht at Tempelfjorden, 2011. Above Nick Drake in Wijdefjorden, 2010. © Deborah Warner.

necessities like GPS and thermal clothing – luxuries unimaginable to the real explorers of the Arctic. The first of these, as far as we know, was Pytheas the Greek in the fourth century BC, who wrote a lost book about his journey ‘as far as the ends of the world’ , which (according to later writers such as Strabo, who disbelieved him) described Arctic phenomena such as frozen seas and the midnight sun. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch and British explorers arrived in Svalbard, driven by commercial imperatives, seeking the North East Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Russian Arctic. They mapped and named the seas, fjords and islands after themselves, and – between the Dutch, British, Danish and Basques – established the annual whaling industry from summer settlements like Smeerenburg, ‘Blubber Town’ , founded by the Dutch in 1619, which consisted of ovens, cobbled alleys and a handful of huts with a fort at the centre. Whaling was the

first phase of European exploitation of the Arctic; by the 1820s the whale and walrus populations had been decimated for the sake of candles, oil lamps, corset stays, sunshade ribs, eyeglass frames, piano keys, and – for the men of Whitby, Grimsby, Aberdeen, Hull and London – work.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Svalbard became a cruise destination. Many of the North Pole obsessives, such as S.A. Andrée, Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile, set off from the islands in airships and air balloons in their attempts to reach the Pole. I am particularly haunted by the story of Nils Strindberg, the nephew of the playwright, who accompanied Andrée on his disastrous balloon expedition in 1897; well supplied with Belgian chocolates, champagne and lightweight aluminium cutlery, they must have felt confident of adventure aboard their balloon made of Chinese pongee silk. Alas they vanished, and their remains were

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electric star.But there was more to Barentsburg

than this: a tiny, beautiful, octagonal wooden Orthodox chapel, full of icons and biros, prayer books and plastic flowers, commemorated the 1996 plane disaster that killed 141 residents. In town, the exceptional museum displayed moving human possessions: the combs and cufflinks of the Russian men who made their lives here, the Pomor whalers’ spoons, pliers, mittens and cooking pots; and a chess set, the board made from a paddle of driftwood, the pieces whittled by hand; the set Miranda and Ferdinand would need for The Tempest.

The best thing in Barentsburg was the time machine on the esplanade, where once the inhabitants might have bought lollies from the kiosks while taking in the view of the icy sea. Fashioned from the engine and propeller of a crashed helicopter, and the parts of a 1960s wannabe Buick, these basic genes had been engineered miraculously into the aquatic fins and flaps of a pink and green speedboat, with once-futuristic gull-wing doors. The dials were not registering and the windscreen was missing. But it was still a work of heroically failed transcendence, created perhaps tongue-in-cheek out of a fantasy of a Great Escape from this place, from this time; Back to the Future, out across the ice plains of eternity, heading for a better world.

We had come to Svalbard to witness climate change, and to think about how to make work in response to our experiences.

‘Some evidence confronted us head-on; we sailed up Liefdefjorden to look at the monstrously beautiful glaciers, and for 20 minutes we passed through open waters that, just two decades ago, had been solid, ancient ice. We started to understand the consequences of the melting of glaciers, sea ice and the permafrost. Soon, perhaps within ten years, there will no longer be any arctic summer sea ice; the consequences of this man-made destruction of the great shield of ice that reflects back so much solar radiation, will affect everything – us, most certainly, included.

After I returned from Svalbard, I fairly quickly took up where I left off, enjoying all the fruits of a twenty-first-century, first-world lifestyle, albeit with a little more understanding, considerably more guilt, and a fading intention to change my consumption patterns. But I was confronted by the scale of the subject and anxious about the obvious, embarrassing perils of preaching, didacticism and modish apocalyptica. Luckily, Matt Clark, of United Visual Artists, who was also on the Noorderlicht, commissioned me to create poems and texts for his installation High Arctic (which opened the National Maritime Museum’s new Sammy Ofer Wing in 2011). This offered an exciting, panoramic and beautifully abstract, theatrical setting. Armed with the idea of unfreezing Arctic voices (both human and non-human) from the distant past through to 2100, which would speak or whisper to the audience as

only discovered in 1930 on Kvitoya Island: a few bones, a diary, its pages stuck together, and – most movingly – several rolls of film taken by Strindberg, containing images of their last days.

Then came another form of exploitation; several mining towns were established on Svalbard, including Longyearbyen, Ny-Alesund and Barenstburg. The first has long since given up mining for the more profitable business of tourism, and the aerial tramways stand abandoned along the bleak hillsides above the town. Ny-Alesund is now the world’s northernmost science research station. But Barentsburg, the Russian mining station, only ceased commercial mining in 2006. We stepped ashore there into a Tarkovsky set: apparently disused public buildings – library, sports centre, community centre – and a black playing field with twisted goalposts. We saw here the world’s most northerly statue of Lenin; also an imposing and uplifting mural of a (transvestite?) polar explorer, with white beard, full ruby lips and the glittering eyes of a mermaid. On the opposite side of the street, someone had hand-painted a huge billboard with an idyllic vista of birch woods in spring to counter the treeless truth of the Arctic landscape. Occasionally, small, dirty diesel vehicles trundled past, in no hurry and with no obvious destination. A man walked down the street carrying a plastic bag, his hood down. On the hill, picked out in large white Cyrillic letters, ‘Peace on Earth’ . Atop a steel tower shone a single

Left to right Statue of Lenin in Barentsburg, Svalbard, 2009. Photograph by Oda Bhar; the Orthodox chapel in Barentsburg, commemorating the 1996 plane crash. Photograph by Tore Berg, 2012.

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A WINTER EDEN

they moved through the installation, I began a new phase of exploration and discovery, this time in the warmer environment of the London Library stacks.

I read the popular accounts of the explorers such as William Scoresby, Fridtjof Nansen and Matthew Henson, the African–American explorer who had a greater claim than Robert Peary to be the first man at the Pole, together with the Inuit men who posed with him for the photograph: Ootah, Ooqueah, Egingwah and Seegloo. I looked into the life-and-death cycles of Mercury, PCBs and methane and their devastating potency in the Arctic. I admired the courage of Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the Inuit activist who campaigned for the Stockholm Convention (effective 2004), which banned POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants), the noxious products of our factories which, through biomagnification, cause a range of cancers, reproductive,

The museum displayed moving human possessions: a chess set, the board made from a paddle of driftwood, the pieces whittled by hand

‘

’

.

profoundly about the meaning of the Arctic landscape, became my guide. I wanted to give all these figures, known and unknown, human and not – and even the Future itself – the chance to tell their stories in their own voices, hence the poems in my collection The Farewell Glacier (2012).

There are of course many Arctics – most importantly the indigenous Arctics. But there are also the Arctics of the imagination. My journey to Svalbard compelled me to think about how the Arctic is a place we’ve made up as much as explored or ‘discovered’ , and how powerful those fantasies have been: legends, stories, beliefs and imaginings slowly transmuted into ideals and obsessions of heroism and splendid deaths, of discovery and destruction, of class and curiosity and terror, of wonder and disaster, of euphoria and greed and delight.

The truth is we have also exploited and damaged the Arctic, almost from the start. The Inuit have a saying about us, the industrialised: ‘You are the people who have changed nature. ’ And so it goes on: as the sea ice melts, the oil companies are already sizing up the commercial prospects of this winter Eden. Seen from this perspective, climate change is the latest, and most confronting, phase in the story of our exploration and exploitation, our asset-stripping mentality, driven by CEOs, shareholders and quarterly figures. So it seems to me the Arctic holds a mirror up to us. However hard it is to look at directly, it shows us what we have done and, even more importantly, who we are, in our fears and greeds and desires. And perhaps this is where the imagination might come into play again, in a different way. For we must look into that mirror and try to imagine a future in which we might make different choices, and tell different stories, with different endings from the one we fear.

What was it like? That is a difficult question.You might think of a high-rise mega-city,Ice-filled penthouses, snow-stocked apartment towersAnd locked ziggurats – or a cathedral façade,An unfinished work forever in progress;Or the Snow Queen’s abandoned mansion,Eroded dynasties of peeling white wallpaperIn ballrooms lit by chandeliers of ice,Dadoes and cornices broken off, zigzagsOf stairs which led to attic rooms where timeFroze to death – Or perhaps a cold library of snow,Where every winter’s tale’s a long-lost folioOf white pages on unnumbered shelves of iceIn the crowded stacks balanced on stacksReceding infinitely back through centuries;Maybe the frost fairs when the Thames froze overAre recorded somewhere here, and Bruegel’s huntersAre returning home in the last of the light;Maybe there’s a thin black line where ancient citiesBurned down to ash.

We stood and stared, face to faceWith the Farewell Glacier waiting for the thunderTo crack deep in its blue heart, hoping forThe satisfying, frightening finaleOf towers of falling ice, falling, falling …Which did not happen;But once the sea drew in a different breathAnd held it,And then a single wave ran all along the shorelineLike a cardiograph registeringThe result of a slow warLost a hundred centuries ago.

And when we sailed awayAcross the inches of the sea-charts,What did we think we’d seen through the cruel eyesOf our cameras framing, clicking, and failing to captureThe beauty of the beast? Would we confessTo the tiny cries which issued from our mouths?Did we understand what we tried and failedTo make out in the infinite fracturesOf its blind archaic mirror of lost timeWas only ourselves?And when we return to our warm living roomsWhere we live like gods on borrowed time,How will we recall this frozen auditoriumAnd its oracular silence,And the last, long performanceOf its disappearing act?

From The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe Books, 2012) by Nick Drake

immune and neurological defects in the Arctic animal and human population. I relished contemporary writers’ accounts of the Arctic, in particular Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven (2001) and Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North (2009). I worked my way through contemporary considerations of climate change and indeed the fundamental question of how things change, such as Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006), Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption (2011) and Thomas L. Freidman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008). I May be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1996) by Francis Spufford, and above all Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986) were my greatest discoveries in this rich trove. I borrowed from Barry Lopez one of the epigraphs for my book: ‘You have to begin to change your mind to understand the Arctic, ’ and his publication, which thinks

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Next door to the London Library, at no.15 St James’s Square, two hundred years ago a battle royal took place. That house had been the town residence of John Ker, the 3rd Duke of Roxburghe (1740–1804). It was close to that of his friend and contemporary, George III, at St James’s Palace. Both collected books eagerly, and used the same bookseller, James Edwards. They might, indeed, have been brothers-in-law, for the Duke had fallen in love with Queen Charlotte’s sister, but their engagement had been called off when the royal marriage was arranged. The Duke never married, so on his death the title went to a cousin, and his great library was sold, off the shelves, beginning on 18 May 1812. The ground floor of no.15 was packed day after day until 16 June, the eve of the day on which the book that had already caused the greatest excitement was to be sold. This was the first edition, then believed to be unique, of Boccaccio’s Decameron, printed in Venice in 1471.

That evening a group of ‘enthusiastic and resolute Bibliomaniacs’ dined together at the lawyer William Bolland’s house in Adelphi Terrace, located between the Strand and the Thames, among them the Revd Thomas Frognall Dibdin, chronicler of the sale, and his hero, the 2nd Earl Spencer. At Dibdin’s suggestion they agreed to dine together

ROXBURGHEThis society of bibliophiles was founded two hundred years ago, and had its origins next door to the London Library. Nicolas Barker recounts its beginnings and describes two centuries of extraordinarily passionate book-collecting.

CLUB

THE

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p

ROXBURGHEagain the next day, ‘after witnessing the knocking down of that magical article’ .

The day dawned dark and rainy, and Dibdin described how ‘a sudden darkness … gave rather an additional interest to the scene’ . Lord Spencer and the Marquess of Blandford were the two contestants. ‘ “A thousand guineas” were bid by the Earl, to which the Marquis added “ten”. ’ Finally, ‘ “Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds”, ’ said Lord Spencer. ‘The Marquis quietly adds his usual “ten”, ’ and that was that. ‘The warfare in St James’s Square, ’ noted the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘was equalled only by the courage and gallantry displayed on the plains of Salamanca about the same period’ . Dibdin recalled that ‘a suitably elated company sat down, eighteen strong, at the St Albans Tavern that evening, Earl Spencer presiding at the head of the table’ . Toasts were drunk to ‘The immortal memory of John Duke of Roxburghe, of Christopher Valdarfer, printer of the Boccaccio of 1471, of Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, the inventors of the art of printing, of William Caxton, Father of the British press’ , and a host of other worthies, ending with ‘the prosperity of the Roxburghe Club and the Cause of Bibliomania all over the world’ . The toast has been drunk by members of the Club formed on that occasion at the annual anniversary dinner ever since.

A dozen more members were added the next year, altogether a diverse company: noblemen (the 6th Duke of Devonshire, just 21), country gentlemen, lawyers, clergymen, no less than three West India merchants, and the two sons of James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer. One member was famous, Sir Francis Freeling, whose reorganisation of the postal service paved the way for Rowland Hill’s ‘penny post’ . Another was the hero admired by all the rest, Richard Heber, the greatest book-collector of them all, who had some 200,000 books in 8 houses at home and abroad, and knew and had read them all. The dispersal of his library in the 1830s fuelled those of three generations to come.

What were the books that Heber and his fellow-members of the Club liked? They collected the classics, in first editions or editiones principes, as they were known; romances of chivalry, like the Morte Darthur; works on local

topography and antiquarian lore; and the earliest accounts of distant places, like America; or the latest works of natural history with (a novelty) coloured pictures. But most of all they treasured what they called ‘black-letter tracts’ , the earliest works of English literature, still printed in the old gothic type.

It was this treasuring of black-letter tracts that led to the Roxburghe Club’s second innovation, more serious than drinking healths to bibliomania. It was thus noted in the Club’s minutes: ‘It was proposed and concluded for each Member of the Club to reprint a scarce piece of ancient lore to be given to the Members, one copy being on vellum for the Chairman, and only as many copies as Members; Mr Bolland announced his intention to reprint Lord Surrey’s Virgil to be distributed next year. ’

Surrey’s translation of part of the Aeneid had been the first of his works to be printed in 1554. It now became the first of the long line of ‘Roxburghe Club books’ , over 300 strong now. The book and its successors were given a uniform binding, dark red boards with a green, black or brown leather spine. This style, meant to be temporary, was too pretty to be thrown away, as boards had been previously when the book they protected was given a permanent binding. So the term ‘Roxburghe binding’ was added to the language of book-binding. In sturdier form, it remains the Club’s style to this day, with occasional variations of colour.

All the early books were slight in structure, like the black-letter tracts they imitated; in 1817 James Boswell the younger gave the Roxburghe Garland, a book of drinking songs to be laid on each member’s place at the anniversary dinner that year. No less than nine books followed next year, most of them printed at William Bulmer’s Shakespeare Press, based at 3 Russell Court, off Cleveland Row, in St James’s. In 1819 there was another innovation. Two books were printed that were not reprints of earlier printed books, but ‘first editions’ in their own right: Le Morte Arthur, not Malory’s but the earlier version, taken from a Harley manuscript in the British Museum, and William Caxton’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from the manuscript at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Judicium, one

Opposite John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe,1761, by Pompeo Batoni (Floors Castle, Roxburghshire).Above The dedication page of the first Roxburghe book.

Toasts were drunk

to “the prosperity of

the Roxburghe Club

and the Cause of

Bibliomania all over

the world”

‘

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When Lord Salisbury became

President, he entertained the Club in

his London house, saying that nothing

would induce him to eat in a tavern

‘

’of the Wakefield cycle mystery plays, followed in 1822, presented to the Club by Peregrine Towneley, who then owned the manuscript. Another change took place in 1827 when it was decided ‘that a MS of general interest, should be selected and printed at the expence of the Club’ . The choice fell on the early English epic, Havelok the Dane, which the rising scholar Frederic Madden was invited to edit; 80 copies were to be ‘printed at the Shakespeare Press in crown quarto and in black-letter of which each member should have two copies’ .

The early 1830s saw several changes. Some of the older members, Lord Spencer, Heber and Sir Walter Scott, died. The number of members was increased to 40 in 1839. An annual subscription was introduced, to be ‘expended in printing some inedited Manuscript, or in reprinting some Book of acknowledged rarity and value’ , of which ‘extra copies should be printed (the number not to exceed 100)’ . These rules, with minor changes, have governed the Club ever since. Two successive earls of Powis and the 1st and 2nd lords Aldenham held office in the Club for almost a century, dividing the presidency with the 5th Duke of Buccleuch, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (simultaneously Prime Minister) and the 5th Earl of Rosebery. The mid-nineteenth century saw the Club print a large number of mainly medieval texts ranging from The Owl and the Nightingale to the Gesta Romanorum, as well as the series of the Grail romances. These were edited by a group of Oxford scholars, among them Philip Bliss, William Buckley and Joseph Stevenson. They were succeeded by the outstandingly energetic and eccentric Frederick Furnivall, pioneer of the

Working Men’s College and founder of the Ballad, Wyclif, Shelley and Browning societies. His racy and colloquial editorial commentaries startled the dignified members, and he finally set the Club a conundrum by founding the Early English Text Society, whose works were ‘intended, in less luxurious form, for a thousand readers’ .

Amid Victorian seriousness the Club was in danger of losing its way in the world as well as its original joie de vivre. Even great collectors of the next generation, William Henry Miller and Henry Huth, failed to attend meetings; Lord Lindsay, later Earl of Crawford, never joined. The Club survived by changing tack; instead of academic texts, it turned its attention to making facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts. The invention of photography and the many different methods of printing that it engendered in the second half of the century provided the Club with an opportunity. The first full-length facsimile was The Apocalypse of St John in 1876, reproduced by the Bodleian Librarian, Henry Octavius Coxe. It was printed using colour lithography. That was followed by the collotype process, popularised by the Pre-Raphaelites and used in 1885 for Les Miracles de Notre Dame, a facsimile of the great fifteenth-century Burgundian manuscript, also in the Bodleian Library. This came at a turning point. Richard Monckton-Milnes, Lord Houghton, had made the Club more social, and in 1884 the simultaneous election of Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery gave it a new cachet. When Lord Salisbury became President, he entertained the Club in his London house, saying that nothing would induce him to eat in a tavern.

From top The Revd Thomas Frognall Dibdin; George John, 2nd Earl Spencer, by Thomas Phillips.Opposite From The Benedictional of St Æthelwold, a facsimile of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript of 963–984, presented to the Club in 1910 by Spencer Compton Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire.

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THE ROXBURGHE CLUB

.

Although he was never a member of the Club, William Morris, a great collector as well as printer of books at the Kelmscott Press, had a profound in� uence on the Club’s books. Several members collected Kelmscott books, and the elections of Montague Rhodes James in 1909, Charles Harry St John Hornby in 1911 and Sydney Cockerell in 1915 had a strong cumulative e� ect. James was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and already a legendary authority on medieval manuscripts. Hornby, a partner in W.H. Smith and owner of the Ashendene Press, continued Morris’s tradition of � ne printing. Cockerell had been Morris’s secretary and succeeded James at the Fitzwilliam. � eir membership made an impression on the Oxford and Cambridge University presses, which vied with each other to give Roxburghe Club books a typographic distinction that they had lacked before. James’s � e Bestiary (1928), which combined facsimile of a manuscript in the Cambridge University Library with a pioneering textual and art-historical study of the tradition, was outstanding, while John Pierpont Morgan, the Club’s � rst American member, contributed to the Club in 1927 the facsimile of the thirteenth-century Old Testament Illustrations, given in 1608 by Cardinal Maciejowski to Shah Abbas, adorned for him with explanatory notes in a � ne Persian hand, and now in the Pierpont Morgan Library; Cockerell and James provided the text.

More and more books, large and small, have followed since. � e 6th Earl of Ilchester, 7th Earl Spencer, 10th Duke of Northumberland, 1st Viscount de L’Isle, VC, and 6th Marquess of Salisbury have served as presidents of the Club; since 1998 Lord Egremont has been President. � e books have included A Description of Maps and Architectural Drawings … at Hat� eld House (1971), given by the 5th Marquess of Salisbury, including the strategic maps made for his ancestor, Lord Burleigh, and � e Boke of Idrography by Jean Rotz, the world atlas made for Henry VIII and now in the British Library, given by the 1st Viscount Eccles in 1981. His second wife, formerly Mary Hyde, the great collector of Johnson and Oscar Wilde, became the � rst woman member of the Club, and

Besides publishing these solid works of beauty and scholarship, the Roxburghe Club has continued its tradition of conviviality. In 1818 � omas Dibdin, on his Continental tour, entertained the Société des Bibliophiles François to dinner in Paris. In 1994 the Société invited members of the Club to Paris, and reciprocal visits on both sides of the Channel have followed. � e Club celebrates its bicentenary this year with my book, � e Roxburghe Club: A Bicentenary History (published in June) and also, recalling both its origin and its � rst President, a dinner at Spencer House, by courtesy of Lord Rothschild, also a member of the Roxburghe Club.

gave James Boswell’s Book of Company in 1995. Other collectors include Major John Abbey, for whom Anthony Hobson wrote French and Italian Collectors and their Bindings (1953) in the Abbey collection; Albert Ehrman, who collected the documents of book-trade history, and wrote with Graham Pollard � e Distribution of Books by Catalogue (1965) based on his collection; Paul Mellon, who gave Two East Anglian Picture Books (1988), including a facsimile of his own � fteenth-century book of birds, beasts, � owers and trees; and Sir Paul Getty, who gave � e Great Book of � omas Trevilian (2000), another picture book of all things human and divine, made in 1615.

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palpable. At the midpoint of the Ottoman enterprise, the Empire, far from being the sick man of Europe, seemed to be setting a jewelled slipper on its throat.

Dr Johnson objected in 1751 that Knolles’s gifts had been ‘wasted upon a foreign and uninteresting subject, recounting enterprises and revolutions of which none desire to be informed’ , but the Library gives him the lie. The Ottomans did not take over the world, but they may seem to have taken over the Library.

Sir Paul Rycaut was a Levant merchant, based in Smyrna, who introduced the duvet to England. He updated The Generall Historie in 1700, by which time the Ottomans no longer terrorised Europe; they had entered what older historians call their long decline, and the more fashionable describe as a period of adaptation. They still maintained the grand style, though. Describing the arbitrary Ottoman taxes loaded on to foreign merchants, Rycaut has the Vizier say: ‘Do you not breathe the Gran Signor’s air? And will you pay him nothing for it?’

A subsequent generation – which included Edward Gibbon – could turn to Prince Dimitrie Cantemir’s History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (1734), whose increasingly voluminous footnotes eventually overwhelm the text; Cantemir was Prince of Moldavia, spoke 11 languages and developed a notation system for Turkish music. Now that the foot was off the pedal, the world was also ready to be enthralled by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s celebrated Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), which set up a vogue for Turquerie. Lady Mary found the Turks charming rather than fearsome, and as a woman she could give her readers delicious peeps into Ottoman home life. Her enthusiasm for things Turkish

At the height of its sway in the sixteenth century, some 36 nations enjoyed Pax Ottomanica or, if you prefer, groaned under the Turkish yoke. Richard Knolles described an empire ‘holding in subiection many great and mightie kingdomes in Asia, Europe, and Affricke, ... [by] the greatnesse whereof is swallowed vp both the name and Empire of the Sarasins, the glorious Empire of the Greekes, the renowned kingdomes of Macedonia, Peloponesus, Epirus, Bulgaria, Seruia, Bosna, Armenia, Cyprus, Syria, Ægipt, Iudea, Tunes, Argiers, Media,

Mesopotamia, with a great part of Hungarie, as also of the Persian kingdome. ’

Knolles was a Sandwich schoolmaster whose Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603) bears out the remark of the London Library’s founder, Thomas Carlyle, that ‘The good of a book is not the facts that can be got out of it but the kind of resonance that it awakens in our own minds’ . The Library’s 1673 edition, two folio volumes in red and black letterpress, charts the rise of ‘The glorious Empire of the Turkes, the present terrour of the world’ . The resonance is

OttomaniaJason Goodwin finds that seeking out Ottoman titles among the different shelfmarks of the Library is an epic adventure in itself

HIDDEN CORNERS

Map from John Foster Fraser’s Pictures from the Balkans (1906).

‘

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Ottomaniaextended to their practice of inoculating for smallpox; she had her own son inoculated in Constantinople. The Library edition is from 1764.

Out in the stacks, beyond the Safe, the situation grows more complex and interesting. The Ottomans are a vanished people, a ruling caste without legitimate heirs. Nobody speaks their language and, after Ataturk’s language reforms, few people read their books. The word Ottoman does not describe a place, but a sort of pouffe. Perhaps that’s why they don’t have their own shelf in the Library. You invariably discover something about the Turks and Caicos Islands, or Turkestan, as you browse. But to substitute ‘Turkey’ for ‘Ottoman’ sounds cleverer than it really is; the fit is only approximate. In ‘History’ , for instance, you will certainly find those Ottomans lurking in the shelves devoted to Turkey; but they have invaded H. Hungary, too, and dominate H. Egypt. You knew that. The Ottomans held the Balkans, but that doesn’t mean you are about to go rushing off to H. Balkans. ‘Do you not breathe the Library’s air? And will you pay nothing for it?’

There is no H. Balkans. You search for the Balkan Ottomans

under that splendidly idiosyncratic alias, Danubian Provinces. Unless, for example, it’s the siege of Belgrade you want, in which case it’s H. Serbia and Jugoslavia. Your admiration for Ottoman administration increases by leaps and bounds. But don’t think H. is the whole story.

I used to think Topography meant landscape features, murrains, glaciers and geology – until one day my pencil fell through a slot in the metal floor in History and I found myself, for the first time, among the travellers.

The Library’s policy of never throwing out a book flowers in its full magnificence

is not under Levant – no such shelfmark – nor indeed T. East, but T. Danubian Provinces (also note that Philip Mansel’s Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, published in 2011, is in H. Europe & Gen.).

Then there’s the insider view, Evliya Celebi’s Rabelaisian The Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi (2010); anyone who thought they knew the seventeenth-century’s most engaging Ottoman (from, say, Pallis’s In the Days of the Janissaries, 1951) should seize this translation by Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim.

Among the ‘Six Weeks in the Balkans’ style of writing, two stand out. One is that sly travelogue, Eothen (1844) by Charles Kinglake, purporting to be the travel memoir of an objectionable young Milord, who sneers at everything and everyone from excitable pashas to Lady Hester Stanhope. The interview with a pasha (Whizz! Whirr! All by steam!) remains one of the funniest scenes in English literature. But watch out – Eothen is shelved under Topography, East, alongside Marco Polo. Just next door is T. Egypt, with the bad-tempered memoirs, published in 1866, of Emmeline Lott, The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople

in Topography. You never know what you will find, or where. (If you expected to find Patrick Leigh-Fermor in Danubian Provinces, you’d be wrong; see T. Europe & Gen.). Mrs Harvey’s Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes (1871), with its beautiful colour plates, is under Turkey, as is S.S. Cox’s excellent Diversions of a Diplomat (1887). J.H. Skene was one of those snap travel writers who could always turn a jaunt into a book; his Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk (1853) is in two volumes. How did he do it? Perhaps his Anadol (1853) provides a clue, opening with his departure from Istanbul: ‘The full-cheeked Aeolus put his lips to the mouthpiece of the Golden Horn. ’

A generation of British Indian officers took the overland route to their regiments and provided a running commentary on the dissolution of the Empire. One of the last was ‘Selim’ , late of the Indian Army, who wrote A British Officer in the Balkans (1909). H.C. Thomson (‘author of The Chitral Campaign’) appears to have seen beyond those stock characters of Victorian travel, the lively Greek and the introspective Turk but, like Stowers Johnson’s Gay Bulgaria (1964), the title does not deliver. The Outgoing Turk (1897) is actually an account of Bosnia after the Ottoman withdrawal.

David Urquhart was a raving Turcophile and Russophobe, who designed the Circassian national flag and introduced Turkish baths to England. He built himself a palace in Watford and entertained there in the nude; Edward Lear considered him ‘very sufficiently mad’ . The Spirit of the East: Illustrated in a Journal of Travels Through Roumeli During an Eventful Period (1838) is not in fact in T. East, but in T. Greece. Lear is all over the place, but a good start is Susan Hyman’s Edward Lear in the Levant: Travels in Albania, Greece and Turkey in Europe, 1848–1849 (1988), which in spite of its title

David Urquhart was a raving Turcophile

who introduced Turkish baths to England.

He built himself a palace in Watford and

entertained there in the nude; Edward Lear

considered him “very sufficiently mad” .

‘

’

‘A Tartar Khan’, from Evliya Celebi’s The Ottoman Traveller (2010). © National Library of Sweden.

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(she was governess to the Khedive), and the tiny volume of letters, entitled The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, which Sophia Lane Poole wrote ostensibly to, but actually with, her brother, Edward William Lane, author of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1838). He co-opted his sister’s help to report on harems and bath houses.

Until recently, Edmondo De Amicis’ Constantinople (1877) was only available to Library members in Italian; then came the Stephen Parkin translation (2005). To read it is to be transported to nineteenth-century Istanbul through a Magic Lantern, as you stand with Amicis upon the Galata bridge and watch humanity wash by you: the pasha on his curvetting white horse, the eunuch, the ladies in a purdah carriage, the porters, the beggars, the Circassians and the Albanian irregulars. De Amicis, who was a popular children’s author in Italy, did all this on a six-week visit to the capital, and it just goes to show that Victorian men of letters were giants.

Some, of course, took their responsibilities more seriously than others. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall

was a dragoman at the imperial Austrian embassy in Constantinople during the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1827 started publishing his Geschichte des Osmanisches Reiches, mixing the mortar for a relationship that was cemented by Kaiser Bill’s gift of a hideous fountain to the old Hippodrome in Constantinople. Poor old von Hammer. Three complete sets of his ten-volume history darken the shelves like a parody of German professorial dullness (perhaps Carlyle insisted on them?). I think they are not so much a history as a collection of translated firmans and palace documents, of the sort that would nowadays be cobbled

together from the internet, but I haven’t read them. Nor, it seems, has anyone else. Few of these volumes have date-stamped stickers inside the flyleaf at all; others have not seen the light of St James’s Square since 1975. That might seem like yesterday to some members, but it is 37 years ago.

After the heady days when Sir Stratford Canning, known as the Great Elchi, almost personally directed Ottoman foreign policy, the British let the relationship cool; the result was that from a position of chumminess at Crimea in 1856, we sank into enmity and the Dardanelles in 1915. William Gladstone must bear some of the blame: his Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (1876) was a frenzied condemnation of the Turks and set the tone for much that was to come. John Foster Fraser’s Pictures from the Balkans (1906) contains pretty views of Balkan life and a few shockers of Balkan strife; between ‘An Insurgent Band of Bulgarians’ and ‘Servian Village Scene’ comes ‘Slaughter of a Family through religious Animosity’ . The photos of corpses are reproduced with a dotted line along the spine and the queer assurance that ‘This

page can be torn out and destroyed by those who find the pictures too horrible’ .

Browsers should remember that quarto volumes are shelved apart – Ottomanists will otherwise miss Carla Coco’s Secrets of the Harem (1997). Then it’s up to Biography to meet some of the great men of the empire – Suleyman the Magnificent, for instance, or Mehmed II. Lesley Blanch’s The Wilder Shores of Love (1954), which tells how the Empress Josephine’s childhood friend Aimée du Buc de Rivéry entered the Sultan’s harem, is also there. A run of Cornucopia, the magazine devoted to all things Turkish, is available in the Reading Room. There are useful books in Art, Architecture. One is W.R. Lethaby’s influential The Church of Sancta Sophia Constantinople (1894), which never mentions that Lethaby had to study the then mosque disguised as a woman.

Science & Miscellaneous might appear barren of interest to the Ottomaniac. But S. Food comments on that important ingredient in Ottoman culture, including Alexis Soyer’s A Culinary Campaign (1857), in which the great chef warns the British to feed their armies more like the Turks (it has already been explored by Jojo Tulloh in her piece on the Library’s culinary collections in issue 14). This shelfmark should have more on the subject: I recommend Ayla Algar’s Classical Turkish Cookery (1991).

Since von Hammer last saw daylight, the field has livened up considerably. In those 37 years we’ve had such important additions to the collection as Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart: Travels Through Turkey in Search of a Hat (1995), and Christopher de Bellaigue’s Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten People (2009), alongside Mansel’s scholarly Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924 (1995); the extent to which Greek and Balkan grandees were absorbed into the original Ottoman enterprises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is provocatively explored in Heath Lowry’s The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (2003).

The empire was a vast and complex entity that endured six hundred years, and the Library’s collections reflect that fact. Arabia, Hungary, Serbia, Black Sea, Mesopotamia – they all have Ottoman secrets to divulge, and tracking them down is one of life’s great pleasures. How dull it would be to sit in front of a huge bookcase devoted to the subject: how dull, and daunting, and indigestible!.

‘The Ottoman State on the Move’, from Evliya Celebi’s The Ottoman Traveller (2010). © British Library Board, Sloane 3584.

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“The best way to meet Dickens is to hear his own voice, so I’ll start by reading a letter he wrote to his sister Fanny in March 1844. He was in his early thirties and had been travelling to Liverpool and then Birmingham. Back in London, he wrote, ‘My dear Fanny, I left Liverpool at half-past ten on Saturday morning and reached Birmingham at about half-past three; where I was received by some most excellent fellows and straight away conducted to the Town Hall which positively took away my breath [it was a newly built and colossal Greek temple]. A committee of ladies had decorated that immense building with artificial flowers, to such an extent that it looked like a vast garden; and on the front of the Gallery facing the platform were the words “Welcome Dick” in gigantic letters of the same material. ’

He goes on to explain to Fanny what he had been doing the night before in Liverpool. ‘Having danced a Sir Roger [de Coverley, a country dance] of forty couple, until Three o’Clock in the morning, I was rendered rather nervous by these splendid preparations … But I dined by myself at the Inn. I took a pint of Champagne and a pint of Sherry – dressed in the Magpie waistcoat – and was as hard as iron and as cool as a cucumber again. At ten minutes before eight, they fetched me and immediately on my arrival I ascended the Scaffold. The hall was crammed to the roof with all the first-rate Tories, Whigs and radicals in the town … The moment Dick appeared the whole assembly stood up with a noise like the rustling of leaves in a wood; and then began to cheer in the most terrific manner I ever heard; beginning again and again and again. When they at last left off, Dick dashed in, and I must say that he delivered the best speech I ever heard him make.’

You can’t help loving a man who writes a letter like this. It tells us that Dickens was a performer in everything he did. He is performing as he writes for his sister Fanny, the elder sister he wants to impress. He’s also boasting to her about how popular he is, how much he is appreciated and loved. He presents himself in the letter as a high-spirited man, a man who loves dancing until three in the morning, even when he has to give a speech the next day – and as a man who likes to appear in smart clothes – the

CHARLEs DICkENsThe London Library Annual Lecture, delivered at the Hay Festival on 9 June 2012 by Claire Tomalin

Magpie waistcoat. He and Fanny could remember being poor and shabby, and he cared about being smartly dressed now he was a success.

What was he doing in Liverpool and Birmingham? The date of the letter is 1844. England was in recession, and people were suffering from poverty and indeed starvation. He’d travelled to Liverpool to help raise money for the Mechanics’ Institution, which was set up by benevolent people as an educational body for both male and female workers. Dickens believed passionately in education. The Mechanics’ Institution offered lectures, and a library with quiet places for people to sit and work. It offered people a chance to improve themselves, and that’s what Dickens was concerned about. In Birmingham they’d just set up what they called their Polytechnic for the same purpose. Throughout his life Dickens went round many industrial towns in England raising money for such educational institutions. Many of them went on to become the great universities of England, giving us a direct link with Dickens and his interest in education.

At this same period he visited a Ragged School in London. Ragged schools were set up by benevolent people to offer some basic education to children in the cities. There was no state education, and the schools catered for the poorest children, those with no parents, or neglectful ones, many of them living in the streets, supporting themselves as pickpockets, prostitutes, crossing sweepers, laundry girls. They would sometimes explain

a week’s absence from school by telling the teacher they had been in prison. Dickens describes his visit to a Ragged School in a letter to his friend Miss Coutts, the richest and most benevolent woman in England, hoping to encourage her to stump up money for the schools – she did. He describes to her how he went up to the master on his visit, and took off his hat as a sign of respect – and out from under his hat came his glossy, curly hair, falling over his shoulders. One of the small boy pupils said, ‘you can tell he ain’t a barber, ’ because such long hair was unusual then (and Dickens was proud of his). He laughed, but he was very practical. He told Miss Coutts that teaching these children religion was pretty meaningless, since they knew nothing about anything – like Jo the p

‘“I took a pint of Champagne and a pint of Sherry – dressed in the Magpie waistcoat – and was as hard as iron andas cool as a cucumber again”’

025–027_Lecture_6b.indd 25 15/8/12 11:30:55


crossing sweeper, whom he described later in Bleak House. What they needed most was somewhere to wash, since they were all filthy: a typical piece of good sense from Dickens.

Dickens also gave himself to private charity. If a friend died leaving orphan children, Dickens would immediately and unhesitatingly try to help. In this same period an actor he knew called Edward Elton was drowned at sea leaving seven children. His wife was already dead. Dickens immediately formed a committee to raise money, to make sure that they could all be given enough education to become self-supporting in due course. The eldest daughter, Esther, was to go to a teacher training college. He not only formed a committee, but calculated how much capital they would need to be able to help all the children; and he kept in touch with them pretty well to the end of his life.

We think of Dickens as a great Victorian novelist, which of course he was – but to me he always has something of the Regency about him. He was after all born in 1812 when George III was on the throne and the country was at war with France, and he grew up under George III’s two wicked sons, George IV – the Prince Regent – and William IV. Like them he was a dandy, a drinker, a man who liked bright clothes and plenty of gold jewellery. He was convivial as they were, and loved parties, celebrations, dinners, jaunts. When he published a book he would give a dinner, not just for his friends and publishers, but also for the printers, the illustrators and anyone who had been at all involved with the book. As the American critic Lionel Trilling remarked, ‘the mere record of his conviviality is exhausting’ . This is certainly what a biographer finds. He was a man of prodigious energy. He needed to walk 12, 15, 20 miles a day, that was really necessary to him, and I believe you can think of it almost as the way he stoked his creative engine. At night he would walk the streets of London, but those long daytime walks were very important, and when he got old and had some difficulty with gout he said to his best friend, John Forster: ‘You know, I shall explode. I shall perish if I can’t walk. ’

His mental energy was on a par with his physical energy. He was able to write two novels, simultaneously. This always amazes me. His novels went out in monthly instalments, in paperbound little packs – with green or blue paper bindings, very attractive, very cheap, so that for the first time quite poor people could afford to buy fiction. Each month he had to produce an instalment. And halfway through writing Pickwick Papers he embarked on a second novel, Oliver Twist, a very different and heavily plotted story. And now each month he had to produce two quite separate instalments. Then, when Pickwick was finished, he started on a third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, and so still had a double task each month. I can’t think of any other writer who could have taken on so much. He was exhausted by it, yet he produced three classic novels that are on everyone’s shelves in paperback today, and translated into every language.

He continued to publish novels, stories and travel books steadily, and in 1850 he took up a second career, starting a weekly magazine that he called Household Words. He was editor and frequent and superb contributor – he was a first-rate journalist – and although he had an assistant and other help, he was responsible for maintaining its quality and sales for the rest of his life.

As if this was not enough, in 1858 he embarked on a third career as a public performer, travelling round England, Scotland, Ireland, to Paris and to America giving ‘readings’ from his books. In fact he did not read from the books, but constructed special scenes or monologues taken from them, using the most dramatic episodes and funniest voices. They drew enthusiastic audiences wherever he went, and brought him in a large income, but they were also exhausting. His health was deteriorating, but he loved the response he got from audiences, and went on as long as he could. And during these years he wrote two of his greatest novels, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. It is an unequalled achievement by a writer, I believe, to be able to run these three careers – novelist, editor, performer – and keep them all going at once.

A look at Dickens’s background tells us something about how he became a novelist. His father John Dickens was the son of two servants in a grand household, and he got a job with the Navy Pay Office – this was during the Napoleonic Wars, when the Royal Navy was the biggest employer in England. John Dickens was found a job with the Navy Pay Office through patronage, enabling him to marry Elizabeth Barrow, whose father was a senior official in the Pay Office. Charles Dickens was clearly named for that grandfather, but about the time he was born, grandfather Charles was found to have been embezzling the Pay Office funds for years and had to flee the country to avoid prison. To the family, this was a shameful and unmentionable event – a dark cloud that hung in the air, something everyone was aware of, but which was never discussed. This large disparity between what was known and what could be said became part of the background of family life – and in the long run helped to form Dickens’s view of the world. Something similar happened a few years later.

The family was moved to Chatham in Kent when Charles was five, and the boy spent five happy years there. His mother taught him to read, his father owned a collection of eighteenth-century novels, essays, plays and fairy stories that Charles devoured. Most important, he was sent to a school with a good teacher who saw that he had an exceptional pupil and gave him a sense of his own capacities and possibilities, so that he began to have ambitions and to imagine a future in which he might make something of himself. Then his father was called back to London with the family. No school was found for Charles. His father got further and further into debt and soon the boy was taking the books he loved to the pawn shop, then the furniture; then his father was sent to a debtors’ prison, followed by his mother and the other children. A family friend found Charles a job in a blacking factory, putting boot black into jars, down beside the Thames. He was put into lodgings in Camden Town and had to walk to work every day, a child alone in the great city.

It was a trauma in itself for Charles, and what followed is more interesting still. Once his father was out of prison, neither he nor his mother ever mentioned the blacking factory again. So here was a second dark cloud that hung in the air. Something had happened, and not happened. This surely helped to form the imagination of the novelist: the gap between what can be said and what can’t, the humiliations of life that have to be concealed. The experience remained central and crucial to him.

Charles was then sent to an indifferent school for a couple

025–027_Lecture_6b.indd 26 15/8/12 11:31:11

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27”

of years in Mornington Crescent. Then his father’s debts got so bad again that he couldn’t pay the school fees, and Charles had to leave school at 15, for the last time. His mother found him work in a legal office as a clerk, really an office boy.

So there he was, effectively uneducated, in a lawyer’s office at 15 years old. Nine years later he was famous, with the publication of Pickwick Papers. It was an extraordinary ascent. How he did it was this.

His father had left the Navy Pay Office and decided to become a journalist. For this purpose he learnt shorthand, and Charles decided to learn it too. He worked first as a legal shorthand writer and then as a Parliamentary reporter, working in the Commons and the Lords, staying up until two or three in the morning as the debates went on, taking down every word. He proved very good at it and began to be noticed. He started writing sketches of London life, which he gave to various newspapers and soon found he could sell. A writer friend recommended he should find a publisher to put out a collection, and suggested as illustrator George Cruikshank. And so Sketches by Boz appeared in two volumes.

They were such a success that he was commissioned by another publisher to write the Pickwick Papers and, after an uncertain start, they made him famous. This takes us to 1836, which was his annus mirabilis, when he was able to afford to get married and to move into a house in Doughty Street (now the Dickens House Museum), the largest house he had yet lived in. His first child, Charley, was born in January 1837, and in the same year he met his great lifelong friend, John Forster, another boy from a poor background who rose to literary eminence. Forster saw that Dickens was possessed of genius, Dickens saw that Forster could give him invaluable support (while pursuing his own work). And indeed Forster read all Dickens’s proofs, dealt with his publishers, gave him literary advice, reviewed his work and listened to his sorrows and secrets; and when Dickens did conjuring tricks at Christmas parties, Forster was beside him to assist. Their friendship was deep and lasted their lives, as Dickens predicted when he wrote to Forster of it being ‘till death us do part’ . Dickens also invited Forster to become his biographer, a task he carried out nobly. Before I finish I must say something about Dickens and Dr Leavis. Frank Leavis, born in Cambridge in 1895, became a supremely influential critic in the 1940s. He attacked Dickens with devastating effect. He published his critical views in his journal, Scrutiny (1932–53), which was eagerly read by English teachers, and his students at Cambridge, where he taught, went on to become English teachers all over the country, and indeed the world.

His study of the English novel, The Great Tradition, was published in 1948, much of it having appeared first in Scrutiny. In it he declared Dickens to be a novelist greatly inferior to Jane

Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Dickens had written only one important novel, he pronounced – this was Hard Times – and otherwise he was nothing more than an entertainer. Leavis went on, ‘the adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness’ .

Students like to think of themselves as having adult minds capable of sustained seriousness, and they went out in great numbers to become schoolteachers and pass on the message that Dickens was an inferior writer not worth reading. When I was an undergraduate in the 1950s Leavis’s diktat prevailed, and I had a struggle before deciding I would deliver an essay expressing my view that Dickens is a great writer. And when the Dickens scholar, Philip Collins, spoke in Cambridge in 1962 about his book Dickens and Crime, only one person from the English faculty turned up to hear him.

Then something extraordinary happened. Leavis’s severe disapproval of Dickens as a mere entertainer began to be modified. Trevor Nunn,

who studied under him in 1960, told me he was showing signs of this then, and had taken to reading aloud to his students from Dombey and Son and David Copperfield with great dramatic emphasis.

In 1962 Leavis published an essay in an American journal, the Sewanee Review, on Dombey, and in 1970 came Dickens the Novelist, written with his wife Queenie, herself a critic, who must have supported and influenced him in his change of opinion. The book contains a sequence of perceptive and admiring essays on Dombey, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations.Leavis now praised Dickens’s ‘command of word, phrase, rhythm and image: in ease and range there is surely no greater master of English except Shakespeare’ . He wrote of his being a great poet, with an emotional energy and an intelligence that ‘plays and flashes in the quickest and sharpest perception’ .

When The Great Tradition was reissued (1983), he inserted an apology for what he had written earlier, explaining that ‘childhood memory and the potent family-reading experience must be invoked to excuse what is absurd’ in his earlier judgement. His father, who ran a music shop in Cambridge, had specialised in reading Pickwick Papers aloud to entertain the family. Terrible to think that being read to by his father should have spoiled the young Leavis’s view of Dickens – and that he seems to have set down his hostile view without returning to the novels and reading them for himself. In a footnote in his revised Great Tradition he wrote, ‘I now think that, if any one writer can be said to have created the modern novel, it is Dickens’ .

Leavis’s confession that he had changed his mind so completely is a rare act for a critic. He deserves credit for being brave enough to do it. Unfortunately it came too late for thousands of children who had heard Dickens confidently dismissed as not worth reading. I still meet them.

This talk was given informally to the Hay audience. It has been revised and abridged for the magazine.

Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life (2011), 2012 edition.

025–027_Lecture_6b.indd 27 15/8/12 11:31:23


MEMBERS’ NEwSUNDERSTANDING THE LIBRARY’S FINANCES

BE: The Library has recorded a healthy surplus for the year, which suggests that something must be going right. Mark, tell us what was behind this.

MS: The result vindicates the concerted action we took the previous year, both on cost-cutting and revenue generation. On the cost side, we’ve seen the benefit of the redundancies and the pay-scale adjustment, painful though these were for staff. On the income side, membership numbers have held steady at a time when members are having to think carefully about their personal expenditure. Not all our fundraising initiatives have come to fruition yet but we are confident they will in time, and meanwhile others have gone from strength to strength. The Founders’ Circle in particular raised £238,000 including Gift Aid from UK donors, and in December 2011 we launched a US chapter in New York – and the donations we’ve since received via our International Friends organisation will give us a useful head start for the next financial year. Our investments have held their own and significantly we’ve managed without a legacy on the scale of the one we received the previous year. In fact as a general principle for the future we intend to designate major legacies as funds for the Development Project or for other strategic initiatives such as retrospective cataloguing, rather than budgeting for them as core income.

BE: That all sounds positive. But you mentioned that not all the new fundraising initiatives have really taken off yet. Inez, perhaps you would like to elaborate?

IL: We need to remember that before 2004 the Library had no specialist Development team at all. It was set up primarily to secure funding for the building project, but since then it has taken on very substantial extra challenges, of both increasing membership income and supplementing it with annual donations on a sustainable basis. The Library is not a charity with the same mass appeal as, say, the big international relief agencies, so we have to be creative and flexible in our approach. In particular, we believe the corporate sector is an area with significant potential, but the relationships take time to develop and need to be handled carefully. During the last financial year we weren’t able to make a great deal of progress with the limited resources at our disposal, but since April we’ve been able to devote more attention to it and the signs are encouraging.

BE: Members might feel uncomfortable with the idea of corporate sponsorship. Can you give some reassurance on this?

IL: The last thing we want to do is undermine the qualities that make the Library such a unique and valued institution. Quite apart from anything else, it would be self-defeating in terms of fundraising – our cultural prestige is our greatest asset. But with the right partner, sponsorship would allow us to run literary programmes and events that would otherwise be unaffordable, generating a surplus for our core activities and helping to raise our profile in the process.

BE: And what about the use of the building? Will the Library be able to accommodate these corporate events without having to reduce opening hours?

IL: There’s no reason why not. The changes we made in autumn 2010 leave us well placed both for one-off venue hire and for corporate functions flowing out of the longer-term and larger-scale relationships we hope will emerge. Just occasionally we may need to use a specific room for a private function, but that’s very different from closing the Library itself. We had to close at 5.30pm instead of 9.00pm on Tuesday, 1 May for this year’s literary dinner, but this is very much the exception that proves the rule. It’s not every day that we receive royal visitors! Compromises sometimes have to be made when we look to develop new sources of income, but the needs of members will always be paramount in our thinking.

BE: Tell us a bit about membership trends.

THE LIBRARY’S CHAIRMAN, BILL EMMOTT, REVIEWS THE FINANCIAL YEAR 2011–2012 WITH THE TREASURER, MARK STOREY, AND THE LIBRARIAN, INEZ LYNN

2011 Core Income (Total £3,539,379)

Membership income £2,362,76666.8%

Gift Aid on membership

income£133,764

3.8%

Revenue Donations £315,566

8.9%

Legacies£466,290

13.2%

Events and Merchandising£33,167

0.9%

Investment Income£227,826

6.4%



7.5%


income£0

0.0%


10.8%

Legacies£50,750

1.6%


0.4%


Core Income 2011 -2012.indd 1 8/8/12 18:20:08

Membership changes by month, April 2007 to March 2012

new or reinstatedwithdrawalsnet

028-038_News_6a.indd 28 15/8/12 11:49:10


IL: Mark made the point that many of our members are having to think hard about their discretionary expenditure in the present austere times, and this is borne out by the statistics. We’re recruiting new members at the rate of over 800 per year, which is very high by historical standards, so we are confident our marketing is working. Unfortunately we’re also losing members at a similar rate, so in a sense we are running to stand still. Retaining members is a more complex and subtle business than recruiting them, and the more information we have about members’ reasons for resignation the better. The recent membership survey, which was summarised in the summer issue of the magazine, has given us some useful insights into what members most value about the Library.

We’re also seeing a gradual shift in the mix of our overall membership between different categories. In recent years we’ve taken steps to widen access to Library membership, by introducing half-price subscriptions for Under-25s and promoting supported memberships in various ways. As a charity, the Library needs to demonstrate that it provides public benefit rather than being an elitist club, and these initiatives are an important part of that. We’ve also encouraged our older members to commute to life membership by reducing the fees for that at the top of the age range. Then this year we cut the spouse membership rate to half of the full rate, and we’ve seen a sharp increase in recruitment to this category – an average of about seven per month compared to just one or two last year. We introduced a new category of institutional membership for smaller organisations, and we’re devoting increased attention to the recruitment of institutional members more generally.

All adjustments to the fee structure clearly have a financial impact, both directly and indirectly, through the response they elicit. For the most part it’s a slow burn rather than a seismic

shift but it’s something we keep under review and it informs our fundraising and marketing plans.

BE: Mark, we need to mention the pension fund. It was closed last year but the accounts show that the actuarial deficit is now double what it was a year earlier. What’s going on?

MS: It’s not good news, but it’s not as bad as it seems. The actuarial deficit is driven by a number of factors, but the most significant at the moment is the rate of interest used to discount the future liability for pension benefits back to present values. Market rates have fallen to record lows and until they recover to more ‘normal’ levels they will inflate the value of the liabilities, and hence the deficit. This is a reflection of wider economic forces that are outside the control of either the Library or the trustees of the fund. But as for the factors that can be controlled, there’s no doubt that closing the fund to future accrual was a vital step as far as the Library was concerned. Since then the trustees of the fund have reviewed its investment strategy and made some changes to give a better match for its future funding needs. So the fund’s asset values have grown, but unfortunately this has been swamped by the increase in the liabilities. The saving grace is that pensions are a long game. It’s not as if the fund needs to pay everything tomorrow, so there is still plenty of time for the funding position to recover, and in the mean time the fund’s trustees are not expecting the Library to increase the rate of its contributions except to keep pace with general inflation.

BE: So some comfort there. Inez, what do you see as the major achievements of the last year and the major challenges for the next?




income£133,764

3.8%


8.9%

Legacies£466,290

13.2%


0.9%


6.4%



7.5%


income£0

0.0%


10.8%

Legacies£50,750

1.6%


0.4%


Core Income 2011 -2012.indd 1 8/8/12 18:20:08




income£133,764

3.8%


8.9%

Legacies£466,290

13.2%


0.9%


6.4%



7.5%


income£0

0.0%


10.8%

Legacies£50,750

1.6%


0.4%


Core Income 2011 -2012.indd 1 8/8/12 18:20:08

Membership changes by month, April 2007 to March 2012

028-038_News_6a.indd 29 15/8/12 10:58:20


IL: I think the achievements have been spread across the whole range of the Library’s activities. Use of the collections continues to grow – we saw a particular rise in the amount of Fiction and History borrowed this year – and, despite the challenging financial circumstances, we took a decision to increase the budget for digital resources. This enabled us to expand the range of full-text newspaper archives we make available to members. Additions included the 19th Century British Library Newspapers collection (over 2 million pages of national and regional newspapers), the Illustrated London News, the Listener and the London Review of Books, as well as the Guardian and Observer Online and the Sunday Times Online. These resources are all being well used so are clearly an important additional resource for members.

We also renewed our website in the course of the year to make it easier to navigate and to provide for additional functions. We entered the world of Twitter and already have some 6,500 followers – a development that may fill some members with horror, but in fact we are finding it really useful as a way of spreading the word about the Library to a new audience and interacting with some of our members.

Some major achievements have been thrust upon us. We suffered a serious flood in the back basement last August when a joint between two sections of pipework failed suddenly before the Library opened one Monday morning, allowing mains water to pour into the area for some time. The first staff arrived at

THE LONDON LIBRARY STUDENT PRIZE 2013

Following the great success of the inaugural London Library Student Prize in 2012, final-year undergraduate students at universities across the UK are once again invited to enter the competition this year. Working in partnership with The Times and Milkround, the Student Prize offers a substantial cash prize – £5,000 to the winner, £1,000 to three runners-up – as well as the chance to be published in The Times and the London Library Magazine. The winner and the three runners-up will also receive a year’s subscription to The Times and a year’s

7.30am to find water lapping over the bottom shelf throughout the Topography section. It is a tribute to our support staff and emergency response team that their prompt action prevented any escalation of the damage. Nevertheless some 3,000 volumes were waterlogged and had to be carefully packed up and sent off-site for immediate freeze-drying. Once returned, each volume had to be assessed as to whether it could go back to the shelf or needed conservation work, or rebinding first. Some volumes suffered too much damage to be saved so replacement copies had to be tracked down and purchased. All in all it proved an enormous task, carried out over nine months on top of all the normal work of the Preservation & Stack Management department, Acquisitions staff and cataloguers.

It brings home to us all how vital the next phases of our Development Project are to ensure that elderly pipework is replaced and the collections safeguarded. Work towards Phase 3 will be one of the major challenges for the coming year, and we’ve now secured sufficient funds to allow us to start on the refurbishment of the main Reading Room early in 2013. We are also in the process of finalising a new Strategic Plan for the Library and preparing an application to the Arts Council for the Library’s collections to be ‘Designated’ as of national and international quality and significance. If awarded, Designated Status will open up new fundraising possibilities for the care and development of the collections. So another busy year ahead for us all, I think.

THE FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE UK & USThe Founders’ Circle, launched in September 2010, has been a huge success and is about to enter its third year. We are most grateful to the members of this special group, whose names you see listed on the following page.

The purpose of the Founders’ Circle is to generate significant funds to support the Library’s ongoing running costs, while offering those who sign up the opportunity to join their fellow Founders at a variety of interesting and exclusive events throughout the year. Over the past year Founders have gathered together for the Annual Literary Dinner (hosted this year by Sir Tom Stoppard, with guest of honour HRH The Duchess of Cornwall), attended lunches with the Chairman and a range of other writers, and had the opportunity to gain exclusive access to many wonderful institutions including Sir John Soane’s Museum,

Library membership, as well as the opportunity to take part in a mini-internship at The Times.

Entrants need to submit an 800-word piece of writing in response to the competition’s theme this year: ‘Gap Years: A New Form of Colonialism?’

Entries close on 11 January 2013. If you are a final-year undergraduate student, or if you know of any who you think would be interested in entering the competition – friends, children, grandchildren – please help us spread the word!

For more information visit londonlibrarystudentprize.com or contact Elena in the Development Office (tel. 020 7766 4704, email [email protected]).

Carlyle’s House and the extraordinary Wormsley library near High Wycombe. Last year the US Founders’ Circle was successfully launched in New York, and we are excited to announce that the 2012 winner of the Life in Literature Award, Philip Mansel, will be our special guest at the US Founders’ Circle drinks reception in October. In addition to this New York drinks party, we have a host of events lined up for the autumn, including a trip to Waddesdon Manor, an evening at the Mayfair bookshop Heywood Hill and a private tour of the Bank of England.

There are three levels of annual membership: Dickens, Thackeray and Martineau, at £10,000, £5,000 and £1,500 respectively.

If you are considering joining the Founders’ Circle in the UK or the US and would like to hear more, please contact Bethany McNaboe (tel. 020 7766 4750; email [email protected]).

028-038_News_6a.indd 30 15/8/12 10:58:34


MEMBERS’ NEWS

DONATIONS AND BEQUESTSThe trustees are most grateful to all the donors listed below, who have made contributions in the year ended 31 March 2012 either for specific purposes or towards the general running costs of the Library:

DEVELOPMENT APPEAL FUNDDouble Elephant FolioMrs T S Eliot The Monument Trust

FolioPeter Jamieson

QuartoDr Penelope McCarthyBasil Postan

DuodecimoTrevor Coldrey The O J Colman Charitable Trust Peter FirthJames FisherThe J P Jacobs Charitable TrustK H McIntoshThe Viscount NorwichClive Priestley CBSir Roy Strong Jeremy White

SextodecimoDr Richard Barber Alexander Barr Sebastian Brock Margaret BuxtonCurtis Charitable TrustJane FalloonRichard FreemanMichael GainsboroughThe Rt Hon The Lord Justice

LongmoreRichard LyonJohn Madell John Massey StewartJohn Perkins W G Plomer Sonia Prentice Joan Rees Janet Rennie Peter Rowland The Lady Soames DBE Dr Gerassimos Spathis Christopher Swinson Ann Williams Anthony J T Williams

FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE (UK)DickensJohn and Dianne Browning

Katherine Bucknell and BobMaguire

Adam and VictoriaFreudenheim

Miles MorlandElisabeth MurdochBasil PostanSir Timothy RiceMark StoreySir David Tang KBEArjun WaneyNaomi Zimba Davis

ThackerayCapital International LtdBill EmmottAnthony FryVictoria HislopRichard and Virginia LangstaffTim SandersonProfessor Simon Schama CBESir Tom Stoppard OM CBE Philip Winston

MartineauProfessor Jenny Bourne TaylorMark Burton Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, BtLady Sarah ChattoHarriet CullenRaymond DuignanLouis and Sarah ElsonHRH Princess Firyal Sir John GieveLouis Greig Loyd GrossmanLawrence and Lucy GuffeyProfessor Jocelyn HillgarthLouise HobbsPhilip HookerSarah Ingham Hugh JohnsonRoger JospéA M KeatJohn Knight Leonora, Countess of LichfieldHis Hon Humphrey Lloyd QCPeter MacDonald EggersThe Mackintosh FoundationJane and Alexis Maitland

Hudson Kamalakshi Mehta The Viscount NorwichPhilip PercivalEric and Maria Rhode

Alan Russett Theresa Sackler Sir John Scarlett KCMG OBE James Stainton Marjorie Stimmel James StittPaul SwainHarriet Tuckey Terry WalkerJohn C Walton Clive Wright FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE (US)DickensLouis & Gabrielle Bacon

ThackerayWilson and Mary BraunTimothy CollinsGifford CombsMr and Mrs Robert Taubman

MartineauAnne H BassJerry and Jane del MissierDavid Gartside and Archana

VatsMr and Mrs James L Johnson Mr and Mrs William R

Loomis JrJames and Erin McBurneyPfeifler Family Foundation Professor Elihu and Suzy Rose Robert Rosenkranz and

Alexandra MunroeHank and Sarah Slack Douglas Smith Mrs Charles Wrightsman BOOK FUNDCanonThe Atkins Investment TrustThe Rothermere Foundation

ParagonMark Storey

Great PrimerThe L E Collis Charitable TrustDr Catherine Horwood Basil Postan

CiceroThe All England Lawn Tennis

and Croquet ClubJohn BarneyThe Viscountess Boyd

Charitable TrustBarnabas Brunner Robert Cope Jonathan Keates Kevin Murphy Sybil Shean

NonpareilAnn BowtellDr John Burman Rupert ChristiansenGraeme CottamNorman FranklinMelanie GibsonJane GregoryAndrew Hine Henry McKenzie Johnston CB James MyddletonMichael Renshall CBEKeith Sissons

BrilliantNicholas BaringPhilip BoveyLucienne Boyce Sebastian BrockMrs J H BrownePenelope ByrdeHenry CobbeThe J P W Ehrman Charitable

TrustIrene Greatorex Alan Gregory CBELionel Halpern Patrick HanaganSir Max HastingsJudy HillmanAshley HuishStephen PlaisterSusan ReynoldsProfessor Henry Roseveare Lady Susan SandersRosemary Stewart (Mrs I M

James)Fiona WigzellDonald Wintersgill

ADOPT A BOOKDr Polly Bird Hilary Boyfield in memory of

Ray Boyfield OBE Gillian Comins

028-038_News_6a.indd 31 15/8/12 10:58:48


Sir David Edward CMG QCRita Ensing Susan Goodsir Lawrence GuyerFanny HugillJohn Hussey OBESir Thomas Legg KCB OBEAnne-Marie Maningas Lady Catherine Manning John MitchellJohn Montgomery Kevin Murphy Virginia Novarra in memory of

Alice Gittoes Dr Bernard Palmer Peter Ratzer Anne Richmond-Patrick Thomas Soper Camilla Tabor Randolph Vigne

ADOPT MY FAVOURITE BOOKMichael CohenVanessa HodgkinsonJames IrvineMrs Carol Day Buck

Whitehead

SUPPORTED MEMBERSHIPThe A H J Charitable TrustThe Marquess of AngleseyThomas BeanSue BradburyDavid CashdanGillian CominsGraeme Cottam in memory of

Catherine CharlishP and M GosdenJ HarrodDavid HodgkinsRichard HolmesD G Homfray-DaviesA M KeatInez T P A LynnR D MacLeodDr Charles MoreTim SeverinDavid SherlockThe Revd Ann ShukmanA SokolovDr Margaret Sparks Hugh WhitemoreJohn Wilcox

The trustees are grateful, too, to those who have made donations to the International Friends of The London Library in support of The London Library, and to those who have continued covenants or made

arrangements for Gift Aid donations to the Library.

The London Library Student Prize was generously supported by The Stanley Foundation.

Mr and Mrs Geoffrey Elliott, Austen Hamilton and Virginia Surtees kindly donated towards binding and cataloguing.

The trustees are grateful to an anonymous donor for a generous donation to help continue supporting intellectual refugees under its London Library Fellows programme.

LEGACIESThe Library received legacy income from the following deceased members and friends to whom the trustees are most grateful:

Sir Kenneth BarnesStephen David BonserGeorge Girling GrangeJohn Jacob GrossHenry Stanley Cecil HallMichael J SilvermanLord StrabolgiRosemary Hildegarde SyfretJean Pearl Isabella Watson

A substantial grant was also received from the trustees of the Mrs R M ChambersSettlement.

Jean Tilley kindly donated to the Library in memory of her late husband, Norman Tilley.

ROYALTIESThe literary estates of Ian Parsons, Robert McNair Scott, Reay Tannahill and Sylvia Townsend Warner have provided income from royalties.

We are also grateful to Professor William van der Kloot who has donated royalties from his works.

DONATIONS OF BOOKSThanks are also due to various government and

official bodies, learned societies, institutions and firms, and other libraries and publishers who have given their publications, and to the many donors of books and other items listed below:

Professor John Abecasis-Phillips

Jeremy AdlerAkademie der Wissenschaften

und der Literatur, GöttingenAkademie der Wissenschaften

und der Literatur, Mainz Jonathan AlgarAmici Thomae Mori The Angela Thirkell SocietyThe Anglo-Hellenic League The Anthony Powell SocietyAntique Collectors’ ClubApolloArchivio Letterio ScaliaNeal AschersonPaul AshtonAnthony AstburyPeter Bagwell PurefoyAnthony BaileyDr Phil BakerNicolas Barker OBELorraine BatemanBath Royal Literary and

Scientific InstitutionPeter BattyPeter BazalgetteBBC Research Centre, BristolAlan BellProfessor Vernon BogdanorDr Alan Borg CBEMark BostridgeKeith BotsfordProfessor Jenny Bourne TaylorRichard BradfieldDavid Breuer-WeilThe British Library British Sociological AssociationBromley Central LibraryThe Browning Society Robin BryerSir Colin Budd KCMGDiana Busby in memory of

Christopher BusbyCambridge University LibraryDuncan Campbell-SmithSir Bryan CartledgeCentral Saint Martins College

of Art & DesignColin ChamberlainRachel ChapmanThe Charles Williams Society Lynne ChattertonChris Beetles LtdAndy ChristianThe Churches Conservation

TrustDiana ColdicottJohn ColdstreamAdrian Collier in memory of

Mrs Héloise CollierDr Peter CollisterReverend John CooperDavid CorcosPeter CoxSir Sherard Cowper-ColesGillian DarleyDr Richard Davenport-HinesDr Paul DavisCelia DearingCharles de ChassironDerbyshire Archaeological &

Natural History Society Bejtullah DestaniSara Di GirolamoCatherine DonnerDownside AbbeyTaylor DowningSir William DugdaleNicholas DunbarJulian DuplainFrancoise DurranceDr David DykesPhilip EadeNigel EdwardsDr Brent ElliottGeoffrey ElliottEnglish HeritageEton College Library Dr Lissa EvansRoger Ewbank in memory of

Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank

Carolyn EzekielAilsa FabianThe Fabian SocietyMichael FardellProfessor Craig FeltonFerriday EnterprisesProfessor Allen FisherBenedict FlynnLewis ForemanCharles FosterThe Reverend Stewart Foster

in memory of Henry KeithFoster

Professor Robert FoxNigel FoxellThe Francis Brett Young

SocietyFriends of Canterbury

CathedralFriends of the Dymock Poets Dr Noel FursmanThe late Geoffrey GibbensThe Hon Mrs J GladstoneThe Lord GladwynDr Emelyne GodfreyRobert Gomme CB Sir Nicholas Goodison

028-038_News_6a.indd 32 15/8/12 11:02:06


MEMBERS’ NEWS

Francis GrahamRoger GreavesRosemary Green in memory of

A J GreenThe Guild of the Royal Hospital

of St Bartholomew (Leagueof Friends)

Alan GurneyRobert GwynneKatie HafnerDr Kris Hardin and Michael

KatakisSusie HarriesRear-Admiral Michael HarrisSir Max HastingsColeen HatrickRoberta HayRichard HealeyKaren HearnMargaret HeffernanHelion & Co LtdHertfordshire Association for

Local HistoryMark HichensHigh Commission for the

Republic of CyprusJane HillVictoria HislopPeter HoltRichard HoptonAntony HornyoldProfessor Geoffrey HoskingJolyon HudsonNoel Ing CBEThe Institute of LinguistsWojciech JachimiakMichael JacksonProfessor Frank JamesLiz JensenJohn Buchan SocietySir John Soane’s MuseumThe Joseph Conrad Society

(UK)Keats Shelley Memorial

Association Ian KellyMartin KempMichael KendallJohn Kenworthy-BrowneRosanna KingThe Kipling SocietyLynn KnightKongelige Danske

Videnskabernes SelskabChristina KoningJohn KunstadterDavid KynastonOonagh LahrThe Hon Mrs E A LambPaul LatchamJoy LawGosia LawikDr Daniel and Katharine LeabColin Lee

Geoffrey LeeJulia LeeMichael LeeJoshua LevineOscar LewisohnThe Library of CongressDr R T Longstaffe-GowanHin-Cheung LovellAlex LowryInez T P A LynnFiona MacCarthyMajor Nicholas Maclean-BristolMacmillan PublishingNadine MajaroAlberto ManguelThe Marie-Louise von

Motesiczky Charitable Trust

Dennis MarksStephen MarquardtPhilip MarsdenAdam Mars-JonesAnthony MartinThe Massachusetts ReviewPauline MatarassoYsenda Maxtone-GrahamDavid McAlpineDavid McFetrichFrançoise MobbsChristopher MooreStephen MooreRichard MorganGeorge MorrisSimon MorrisDr Jacqueline MulhallenDr Michael MulryanAlan MumfordDr Norton MurgraffMuseo Vincenzo VelaEric MusgraveJeremy MussonProfessor Tatsushi NaritaCharlotte NassimThe National Art Collections

FundThe National GalleryThe National TrustMr and Mrs Conrad Natzio

in memory of Dr ElizabethMonkhouse

Michael NelsonNew StatesmanNew York Society LibrarySimon NichollsVirginia NicholsonDr Daniel NolanJerry NolanNotes and Queries for

Somerset and DorsetJohn O’FarrellDr Richard OlneyHelen O’NeillHugh O’ShaughnessyStephen Ongpin

Professor Eric OrmsbyÖsterreichische Akademie der

Wissenschaften Oxford Film and TelevisionOxford University PressProfessor Patrick ParrinderCharles PascoePenguin Group UKMichael PeppiattJohn PerkinsDavid PermanStephen PhelpsChristopher PhippsPolish Cultural InstituteDr Cecilia PowellClaire PowellAlan PowersThe Powys SocietyPro HelvetiaProquestProspect BooksPushkin PressPaul QuarrieRandom House GroupSir David RatfordAnthony RichmondRidinghouseNicolas RidleyAndrew RobinsonThe Rothschild ArchivePeter RowlandRoyal Academy of ArtsThe Royal Anthropological

InstituteThe Royal Artillery InstitutionThe Royal Castle in WarsawRoyal Collection EnterprisesRoyal Horticultural SocietyThe Royal SocietyRoyal Society of Literature Royal Thai EmbassyThe Rupert Brooke SocietyJoseph RykwertProfessor Patrick SalmonSamuel French LtdJem SandfordClive SavilleDr Richard Saville in memory

of John SavilleJonathan Schrager in memory

of Jonathan HorneKarsten SchubertLord and Lady ScottAnne SebbaCaroline ShawDavid SherlockRobert ShermanSam ShingletonSiegfried Sassoon

FellowshipAnn Simpson in memory

of Renate S Simpson (néeKuczynski)

Dr Susan Sloman

Smithsonian InstitutionSociety of Antiquaries of

LondonSociety of AuthorsSociety for Psychical ResearchThe Society of Women Writers

and JournalistsAntonia SouthernProfessor Andrew SpicerAlison SprostonLouise SteinDr Richard StephensCraig StephensonTimothy StevensLady StrabolgiStrange Attractor PressProfessor Lynne SuoVirginia SurteesSydney Smith AssociationTate GalleryNeville Teller MBEJohn ThirlwellLord Thomas of SwynnertonTindal Street PressCount Nikolai TolstoyThe Trollope SocietyBeryl TunnicliffDr Barry TurnerThe University of DublinClive VaiseyWilliam and Maggie Vaughan-

LewisPetar VelnicMargaret VoggenauerJeanne VronskayaDr Daniel and Mrs Pamela

WaleyChristopher WalkerMichael Walton in memory of

Michael FentonJeremy WarrenDr Peter WatsonJane WeeksGavin WeightmanKrystyna WeinsteinTimberlake WertenbakerSheila WhitakerProfessor Sir Christopher White

CVOJerry WhiteClovis WhitfieldPaul WhitfieldJenny WilhideDr Susan WilliamsJohn WilsonMichael WilsonThe Writers’ Guild of Great

BritainDr Ann WroeVladyslav Yavorskyy

028-038_News_6a.indd 33 15/8/12 11:02:15


We are delighted to announce a generous donation of £250,000 by London Library Vice-President, Mr Lewis Golden OBE JP FCA, towards the Library’s Endowment Campaign. Named in memory of his beloved wife, the Jacqueline Golden Endowment will be a permanent source of income for The London Library, providing significant and much-needed funding towards the running costs of the Library in perpetuity.

One of the Library’s long-term strategies is to build up permanent endowments that will remain in place as a source of income, ensuring that the Library will always have the resources to fill the gap between running costs and the income derived from membership fees as it enters the next phase of its development. It is to this end that we have begun actively seeking contributions to such an endowment fund.

We are thrilled that Mr Golden has led the way by making this extremely generous gift in memory of his wife, Jacqueline – a further act of kindness towards the Library in a long history of personal philanthropy and expert guidance. Both jointly and individually the Goldens have made a remarkable contribution to the Library, offering unfailing support for more than 40 years. Mrs Golden’s ever-smiling, always-interested presence at the Library continues to be sorely missed by us all.

It was through Mrs Golden that her husband first became involved with the Library; he bought her a membership in 1971 after discovering that the Northern Polytechnic, where she read History alongside raising their four children, did not have the books she needed for her studies.

Mr Golden first gave his support to then-Chairman Michael Astor, helping with his fundraising campaign and forming a dear and instant friendship as they worked for their common cause. Mr Golden went on to steer the Library through more than two decades, holding the office of Treasurer from 1972 to 1991 and Chairman from 1991 to 1994, during which time his integrity and clear-sightedness enabled the Library to resolve critical issues that affected its future. The efforts of Mr Golden and Mr Astor effectively rescued the Library’s finances at a particularly challenging point in its recent history.

The London Library has not been the only institution to have benefited from the Goldens’ public benevolence: Jacqueline founded the Golden Charitable Trust, which has provided crucial financial support for organisations as varied and valuable as Westminster Synagogue, Chichester Cathedral and the Royal British Legion, the Petworth branch of which Mr Golden is President; he is also the Vice-President of the Petworth Festival and a Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust.

We are deeply touched that now, in 2012, Mr and Mrs

The Jacqueline Golden Endowment

Golden are once again helping The London Library to navigate the sometimes choppy waters of its financial security both present and future. We thank Mr Golden for all, but especially this most recent, of his gifts to us.

If you would like to make a contribution to an endowment fund, or create a named fund of your own, the Library would be very keen to hear from you. Gifts of all sizes would be warmly received.

To find out more please contact Georgia Mallin in the Development Office (tel. 020 7766 4752; email: [email protected]; or go to londonlibrary.co.uk/supportus/endowmentcampaign).

Lewis and Jacqueline Golden.

028-038_News_6a.indd 34 15/8/12 11:03:03


MESSAGE INSIDE CARD READS:With best wishes for Christmasand the New Year

CHRISTMAS CARD 2012

Show your pride in being a London Library member and help others to learn about the joys of the Library by sending our delightful Christmas card. This year’s card is by award-winning children’s writer and illustrator, Babette Cole. Babette has written over 70 picture books and has worked at the BBC creating children’s programmes such as Bagpuss, Watch With Mother and Jackanory. Her fanciful tales and charming characters have been entertaining children and adults alike for more than 30 years.

Cards are printed in full colour on high-quality card at a standard size (181 x 121mm). The cards are available in packs of 8, together with high-quality peel-and-seal envelopes.

The price is £5.00 per pack, including VAT, postage and handling. Cards are available to purchase via The London Library website or by returning the order form below. Cards will also be on sale in the Library at £4.00 per pack including VAT.

ORDER FORM

PLEASE SEND ME:

______ pack(s) of Christmas Cards, at £5.00 per pack: £______

TOTAL: £______

Please make your cheque payable to ‘The London Library’

YOUR NAME (BLOCK CAPITALS PLEASE)

_________________________________________________________

ADDRESS ________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

____________________________ POSTCODE ________________

HAVE YOU CONSIDERED GIVING A

GIFT MEMBERSHIP?For more information contact Bridie Macmahon

in the Membership Offi ce: 020 7766 4720

�

Please return this form to:The London LibraryChristmas Card Orders14 St James’s SquareLondon SW1Y 4LG


Financial Assistance for Writers

Grants and Pensions are available to published authors

of several works who are in fi nancial diffi culties due to

personal or professional setbacks.

For further details and application form please contact Eileen Gunn, General Secretary,

The Royal Literary Fund, 3 Johnson’s Court, London EC4A 3EA Tel: 020 7353 7159

Email: [email protected]: www.rlf.org.uk

Registered Charity No 219952

The Royal Literary Fund

Royal Literary Fund.indd 1 18/2/09 17:33:16

BRAHMAPUTRA — HUDSON — ST LAWRENCE — MISSISSIPPI — MEKONG — IRRAWADDY — CHINDWIN — DNIEPER — VOLGA — TISZA — SAVA

Exploring the World by River

Call us today 020 7752 0000 for a copy or visit www.noble-caledonia.co.uk

A Comprehensive Guide to River Cruising for 2013

2 Chester Close, Belgravia, London, SW1X 7BE

RHINE — MAIN — MOSELLE — DANUBE — RHONE — SAONE — SEINE — DOURO — ELBE — VLATAVA — NILE — GANGES — HOOGHLY

BOOK EARLY AND SAVE UP TO £1000 PER PERSON

Links with literary agents and top publishers

Recommended by

www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk/mentoring

Six one-to-one online sessions with aprofessional editor and writer.

Assessment of completed manuscript by another TLC editor.

An Industry Day offering advice directly frompublishing professionals.

The Literary Consultancy Ltd can be found at Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA

Tel: 020 7324 2563

email: [email protected]

Chapter and Verse Mentoring Scheme

“ ”Much better value for money than the writing MA I hadpreviously undertaken. All the energy was focused on

improving my novel, and it really paid off.Rachel Connor, Sisterwives, published by Crocus Books 2011

028-038_News_6a.indd 36 15/8/12 11:03:50


Lottie ColeAs we prepare to go to press, we are also preparing to say goodbye to our Development and Communications Director, Lottie Cole, who is leaving us this summer after eight and a half years’ outstanding service to take up the role of Director of Development at the Royal Institute of British Architects. She will be greatly missed, not only for her extraordinary fundraising skill and ability to accomplish more than seems humanly possible in the time available but also for her exceptional creativity, enthusiasm and sense of fun: she routinely generates more fresh ideas in half an hour than most of us come up with in six months!

Lottie joined us in February 2004 when our plans to address the increasingly urgent need for more and better accommodation for books and members were in their infancy. It was clear that a major fundraising effort would be needed and that it was time to set up a permanent fundraising team within the Library’s staff. Attracted by the challenge, Lottie started from scratch – at first alone, but gradually forming a small team around her – and has succeeded in raising over £16 million in capital funds for our Development Project, and increasing annual revenue donations from £14,000 in 2004–2005 to over £360,000 in 2011–2012. As Lottie would be the first to say, it is less the figures that matter than what we have been able to achieve through the great generosity of the donors: the creation of T.S. Eliot House, the new Art Room, the Lightwell Reading Room, the Prevost Reading Room, the Times Room, basement shelving for the entire Periodicals and Societies collections, a Conservation Studio, an accessible entrance, improved circulation around the building and much, much more. With increased revenue donations we have been able to secure our book-purchasing budget in times of economic difficulty, increase expenditure on digital resources, and press on with retrocataloguing and conservation work.

Few members (or even staff) have been aware that Lottie is

STAFF FAREWELLS

Christopher HurleyIn an age when employers frequently have cause to lament the rapidity of staff turnover, it is a delight to celebrate the well-deserved retirement of a member of the Library’s staff who has just completed 46 years’ service. Christopher Hurley joined the staff as a junior library assistant in August 1966 (paid the princely sum of £10 a week), and retires as Head of Country Orders in September.

After some ten years working in the Binding Preparation department,

also a gifted painter, with several successful exhibitions behind her. With typical modesty she designed our Christmas card in 2008, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, but declined to include her name on any of the advertising material lest would-be purchasers be put off. The card was a huge success and it is perhaps not surprising that the London Library Magazine – also her brainchild – has so often been praised for the high quality of its design. Lottie is leaving our Development Office in good shape, ready for her successor who will be recruited in October. Though we are sad to see her go, we wish her every success in the next phase of her career.

Christopher moved into Reader Services in 1977, where he found his forte in the specialist area of Country Orders, responding to complex enquiries and dispatching books by post to members battling with their research in far-flung places. For those members unable to visit the Library in person often or at all, this service is a lifeline and many authors have acknowledged this in their books. The work can present special challenges to staff striving to interpret what is needed at long distance. Indeed, one member recently wrote to thank ‘Mr Hurley in particular, for his helpfulness in pursuing books often quite inadequately described by me’.

Christopher has taken in his stride great changes over the decades – from building projects to computerisation – and his hard work and enduring devotion to the needs of our country members have been of inestimable value to the Library. We will miss his quiet presence in Country Orders but wish him the long and happy retirement he so richly deserves.

Photograph Marcus Dawes

028-038_News_6a.indd 38 15/8/12 11:04:16


EATING OUT

46910

2

5

7 12 8

11

DINING OUT NEAR THE LONDON LIBRARY

This is an advertisement feature.

To advertise please call Janet Durbin

on 01625 583180.

5 DELHI BRASSERIEFor over 20 years, the Delhi Brasserie has served outstanding traditional Indian cuisine to the discerning diner. Situated in the heart of Soho on Frith Street and next to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, we provide a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere. Pre- and post-theatre menus are available. 15% discount for students with ID. Special offer available for group bookings. 44 Frith Street, W1, 020 7437 8261. delhibrasserie.com

10 GUSTOSO RISTORANTE &

ENOTECAHome-style Italian dining room Ristorante Gustoso is found moments from Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Station. Quietly situated, pleasingly intimate, Gustoso is the ideal place to unwind after work, with friends or to enjoy a little romance. Cocktails are served from the bar and the menu is based around the Italian classics. 35 Willow Place, SW1, 020 7834

5778. ristorantegustoso.co.uk

6 THE FOX CLUBSituated a stone’s throw from Green Park and the famous Hyde Park. Our Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and, for those in the know, a lunch-time essential. The modern European menu changes on a weekly basis, offering refined excellence without being pretentious. The effect is a change from the jaded palate of life. The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3– 5pm. 46 Clarges St, W1, 020 7495 3656. foxclublondon.com

11 HIX AT THE ALBEMARLEThis fashionable restaurant offers an outstanding menu of classic British dishes, using local seasonal ingredients. Mark Hix and Lee Streeton offer a full à-la-carte menu alongside a special set-lunch, pre-theatre and dinner menu of £27.50 for 2 courses and £32.50 for 3 courses. Brown’s is also home to the award-winning English Tea Room and the chic Donovan Bar. Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle Street, W1, 020 7518 4004. hixmayfair.co.uk

2 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANTLocated in central Mayfair (nearNew Bond Street), Bellamy’s offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous-name wine list. The Oyster Bar, among its other dishes, serves Bellamy’s famous ‘open’ sandwiches. Le patron mange ici. Open for lunch Mon–Fri; dinner Mon–Sat. 18–18a Bruton Place, W1, 020 7491 2727. bellamysrestaurant.co.uk

7 FRANCO’SFranco’s has been serving the community of St James’s for over 60 years. Open all day, the personality of the restaurant evolves from a quietly and gently efficient breakfast venue to a sharp and charged lunch atmosphere, to elegance and romance in the evening. The lunch and dinner menus highlight carefully prepared traditional and more modern Italian dishes. Our service is always relaxed, friendly and personal. 61 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7499 2211. francoslondon.com

8 GETTI JERMYN STREETA modern Italian restaurant at the fast-paced heart of London’s West End, Getti Jermyn Street is an authentic Italian dining venue in London’s historic tailoring district, dedicated to offering a traditional and memorable Italian dining experience. A splendid destination for London locals and tourists alike, Getti Jermyn Street focuses on serving simple, regional dishes from mainland Italy. Private dining available. 16/17 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7734 7334. getti.com

12 WILTONSEstablished in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat. Choose from an exclusive wine list. Open for lunch and dinner, Mon–Fri. To make a reservation, please quote the London Library Magazine. 55 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7629 9955. wiltons.co.uk

1 AL DUCAServing modern Italian cuisine, Al Duca focuses heavily on bringing out the very best elements of what is one of the most acclaimed gastronomic regions of the world. Simple fresh ingredients are skilfully combined in a wide range of traditional dishes offered both in classic style and with a new twist, all following Pulze’s ethos of reasonably priced good Italian food. Now serving breakfast. 4–5 Duke of York Street, SW1, 020 7839 3090.alduca-restaurant.co.uk

4 CUT AT 45 PARK LANEWorld-renowned chef Wolfgang Puck has made his restaurant debut in Europe opening CUT at 45 Park Lane, a modern American steak restaurant featuring great food in a contemporary and dynamic environment. Located in Dorchester Collection’s new Mayfair hotel, CUT at 45 Park Lane mirrors the award-winning original CUT in Beverly Hills, offering outstanding steaks, a superb wine list and impeccable service. 45 Park Lane, W1, 020 7493 4554. 45parklane.com/CUTat45ParkLane

1

3 BERRY BROS. & RUDD Fine Wine Lunches & DinnersChoose between Berry’s Townhouse or the 17th-century London Cellars. The Townhouse hosts intimate luncheons with fine food and wine. The atmospheric London Cellars are London’s most exclusive fine-dining venue. Housed within an impressive vaulted Napoleon Cellar, you will be treated to an unforgettable luncheon. Tickets pre-booked. 3 St James’s Street, SW1. 0800 280 2440. bbr.com/wine-events

3

9 THE GRILL AT THE DORCHESTERBrian Hughson, Head Chef at the Grill, is passionate about using quality produce sourced from the British Isles. In addition to the British and classic grill dishes offered at the Grill, Brian has reinstated classics from the original Grill menu such as Dish of the Day, and the traditional roast-beef carving trolley introduced at the Grill when it first opened in 1931. The Dorchester, Park Lane, W1, 020 7629 8888. thedorchester.com

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Documents

Issue 17