A day at London Library…

I’ve just had a day at the London Library, thanks to a £15 Day Pass scheme they offer (though note you have to bring various forms of current ID with you, and to let them know in advance – you can’t just turn up).

The main reason I went there was to have a look at the only copy of Charles de la Roncière’s 1934 “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” that WorldCat knows of in the UK (much more on that another day), but in the meantime there’s a lot more to be said about London Library.

For a start, I have to say it’s maddeningly frustrating to the point of near impossibility to find your way around the place. Whereas full members get given a heavyweight induction (I suspect so that people don’t have the embarrassment of stumbling over a new member’s corpse, lying long-dead in a far unlit corner of History Level 6), day pass visitors get dumped in the deep end. Clearly, nobody cares if they live or die: so I’m just glad I got out alive. 🙂

As an aside, if you do want to find your way around London Library, my three top tips are:
(a) Because the building is in two halves (History/Science in one and Art/Language/Fiction in the other), the easiest / most reliable way to get from one to the other is all the way down to the reception area and back up again. Boring, but effective.
(b) Don’t be afraid to turn lights on yourself (most seem to be off, but you turn them on via pull-cords that are usually at the far end of the row of books you’re standing beside). Failing that, trace the wiring trunking above your head and you’ll find the cord about 50% of the time.
(c) If, like me, you want to look at the contents of “Philology, Cryptography” on the Mezzanine floor on the Arts half, ask someone to help you find it – I eventually stumbled upon it through sheer persistence (it’s shockingly similar to Platform 9¾ in Harry Potter), but that was definitely a poor choice on my part.

Speaking of “Philology, Cryptography”, the Library’s indexing scheme is just about as idiosyncratic as the Warburg Institute’s famously obtuse layout. The safest approach is to search the online catalogue to find at least one book you know is going to be there (say, David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”, of which it actually has two copies), and work back to the book’s physical location from there. Once you’re in the stacks themselves, you’ll see all the other weird and wonderful books they have there, which is what using London Library is actually all about. (You can also do that virtually from the catalogue, though it’s not half as much fun).

Other nice things:
* If you bring along a USB stick, you can scan stuff on a funky-looking scanner for free (though it only let me store stuff as PDFs, and the adjustment roller on the left side was broken). But don’t forget to tap the on-screen SAVE button each time (easy to forget).
* If you don’t have a USB stick with you, Reception sells 2GB sticks in a range of colours for a very reasonable £2 each.
* If you’re scanning an oldish book, my advice would be to ask at the desk for a “snake” – a string containing a series of small leaded weights – to hold your book down nicely. Also: click the green horizontal bar to start a scan by squeezing it from above and below at the same time, or else your book may get disturbed.
* London Library has subscriptions to JSTOR, ProQuest and various other services; and even though the search PC itself is inaccessible, the trick is that the monitor has USB sockets on the side that you can plug your USB stick into (i.e. and save PDFs to, to read them at home).
* There’s a members lounge on the top floor of the Arts side… but I ran out of time before sampling its delights and rarified heights.

For me, probably the London Library’s nicest resources of all are its newspaper and journal archives. How extraordinarily splendid to have The Times, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and indeed Le Journal Des Savants all in one place, along with hundreds of others.

But… given that it’s a private library you have to subscribe to, would I really want to pay several hundred pounds a year for the privilege? Well… no. While it does have an excellent and properly eclectic collection of (over a million) books, I think being a member is far more about paying for serendipity: bumping into Stephen Poole’s “Unspeak”, or The BBC Guide to Radio Pronunciation for 1934 to 1937, etc etc etc. If you are a specialist researcher, it’s not so far across town to the British Library and its 170+ million items, a number which makes my jaw ache with droppingness every time I try to even think about it.

At the same time, if I wanted to go through a particular journal or book that the London Library had that wasn’t otherwise digitized, I’d happily pay £15 for a day pass for sure (as was the case here). It’s a nice experience, too (if you don’t mind feeling lost for half the day).

For any bibliophile (or indeed bibliophage) who finds themselves in London for a few days, I’d suggest that a day pass to London Library (it’s not too far from the Ritz Hotel, by Green Park) would probably be £15 very well spent. Cheaper than the London Eye! 😉