The Lost Libraries of London

Ford-Smith, who manages communications, publications, and archives at Bernard Quaritch, put it this way, “Johnson became notorious for many things, and handling his books roughly was one of them.” Unfortunately, their easy-to-identify nature has also meant that autograph hunters have remorselessly cut Johnson’s signature from some. The library will never be completely together again, though Dr. Johnson’s House, which operates as a writer’s house museum at 17 Gough Square in London, is lucky to have reacquired some Johnson titles over time, as well as several of his manuscripts. The museum is in the process of focusing the library’s efforts on eighteenth-century lexicography. (Another stronghold of Johnson’s former library is the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library. What began as a gift from Mary to Donald of a first edition of Johnson’s dictionary became, after sixty years of active collecting, the preeminent collection of Johnson-related material in the world—wonderful, but all so far away from London.)

Dr. Johnson’s House was just one of a dozen stops on Ford-Smith’s frequently sold-out tour of London’s forgotten book history. We started at Gray’s Inn Library in South Square, which was gutted during World War II, but had held a library of one sort or another since 1488 when there is evidence that Edmund Pickering bequeathed six books to be “chained” there. The Inn is not a traditional traveling lodge, but one of the four Inns of the Court, a professional organization dedicated to educating and supporting students of law and barristers. The Inn doesn’t have a specified founding date but has been in operation since at least the fourteenth century; it housed Francis Bacon and counted Queen Elizabeth I as a patron. William Shakespeare is believed to have performed The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s—it has an exceptionally interesting history. But for our purposes, Ford-Smith focused on the impact of the war on London’s libraries. Gray’s, she explained, lost 30,000 books to Blitz-induced fire, the University College of London lost 100,000 books, and the British Library lost over 200,000. Before we continued into the now dark London streets, Ford-Smith told us that beyond London more than one million volumes from libraries and publishing houses were destroyed by Nazi forces in Germany and occupied Europe, the national libraries of Serbia and Germany were destroyed, and “some 65 percent of all Japanese public libraries didn’t see an end to the hostilities.”

The next stop was a non-descript Boots pharmacy, the major national drugstore chain of Britain, where, beginning in 1899, Boots locations offered Boots Book-lovers’ Library to subscribers who chose an annual plan between 10 shillings 6 pence and two pounds a year. By the 1930s there were 460 locations, and Boots purchased over a million books for stock annually. Ford-Smith asks the group why the membership library would be so popular when public libraries were free? We ponder. “Public libraries were not the hubs of fiction they are now,” she said. “Another mark against them was a suspicion that public libraries were unsuitable places for women.” Boots worked to project an image of wholesomeness, and so “any book with a hint of immorality displayed a red label on its spine instead of a usual green one.” The large London bookstore chain WHSmith also ran a library, which now seems an unusual decision for a bookstore, but it was also popular at the height of Boots’ success.

One of the things, of course, that makes London remarkable is its age and the multiple layers of history—that which is hidden, that which is visible, and that which is only visible if you know what to look for. In that sense, Ford-Smith’s Lost Libraries tour is a bibliophile’s dream, and brilliant, because it offers up an opportunity to make a tangible connection to book history as you move through the city streets. 

We visited the site of the former library at Sion College, which lost a third of its books in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and then rebuilt (but had a dishonest thieving librarian in the 1930s). The primarily theological holdings were eventually folded into several different libraries when fortunes declined in the late twentieth century. The building now accommodates bankers instead of books. 

Our pilgrimage continued to Tom’s Coffee House, which opened in 1652 and besides slinging joe is thought to have carried around two thousand printed items. Ford-Smith noted that coffee-house collections were lively and modern, with the latest broadsides and pamphlets, periodicals and magazines, satires and books of a “libertine, or pornographic nature” shelved therein. This, she put in contrast to Samuel Fancourt’s “First Universal Circulating Library,” founded in London in 1742. Fancourt was a dissenting minister and library pioneer who tried several times to get library schemes off the ground. His library was heavy on theology and had to be on the up-and-up. With nothing of a titillating nature among his offerings, it becomes clear why he might have had a harder time sustaining subscriber interest. 

Toward the end of our tour, Ford-Smith stops by St. Bride Library, which was opened in 1895 as a cultural center and printing school. The library holdings contain a world-class printing and graphic art collection, founded upon the extensive library of printer and bibliographer William Blades, who died in 1890. Ford-Smith explained that St. Bride is not a “lost library as such, but is in danger of becoming one.” It closed for a time to new researchers due to limited funds, and the reading room is only open two days a month. She then encouraged us to support it. 

I registered for this tour after reading this description for it: “Twenty-first-century London contains some of the finest book collections in the world, but what about the libraries that haven’t survived? If you know where to look, the city’s streets and alleyways are crammed with the ghosts of libraries past.” It did not disappoint. Ford-Smith’s tour not only informed me of what is lost to time, but what kind of loss can be prevented, and what kind of knowledge is at stake. Johnson’s lost library, while offering intrigue and mystery, is also heartbreaking for bibliophiles—the sources for the Dictionary of the English Language could so easily have been known to us. But, as with many of the points of interest on Ford-Smith’s itinerary, there is something poignant about learning about all the libraries London had that are now gone, or were damaged during fires or wars, or were closed simply due to budget shortfalls. The Lost Libraries tour, what might seem at first a very nerdy way of learning some of London’s multi-layered history, is incredibly resonant and important given the current funding and closure threats in the United States and Great Britain to libraries private and public. In my own new neighborhood of Hampstead, my local library, which is literally attached to the historic John Keats House Museum, had its funding cut several years ago. It has been saved and made independent, spared from closing by volunteers who donate both money and time. One of the first things I did upon moving here was sign up to serve at my local library. 

Sometime after I took her excellent tour, I sat down with Ford-Smith at Quaritch, surrounded by rare books, and we talked a bit more about her love of book and library history and how the tour developed. I put her on the spot for her favorite London lost library, and she chose Boots because, although its library has largely disappeared from popular memory, you can still find ex-Boots volumes at used bookstores. “Everyone can have their own bit of library history for a few pounds,” she later wrote to me in an email, attaching a picture of her prized ex-Boots library book. Not a week later I was rummaging through book stacks at a shop in Hampstead and pulled out a biography of Mae West with a Boots sticker, unexpectedly pleased I had found one, and took it home.