Societies
Nordic Collections at the British Library by Pardaad Chamsaz Many people will not realise that the British Library, responsible for preserving the UK’s printed and digital heritage, is actually very much an international and multilingual collection. It is really a patchwork of significant donated historic collections, supplemented by centuries of acquisitions via legal deposit (the requirement for all books published in the UK to be sent to the British Library) and purchases from all over. That makes for a collection of cultural memory spanning millennia, the entire world and the full range of media from manuscripts to websites, from drawings to oral histories. The British Library has systematically acquired Nordic books ever since the 1840s, when there was established, under the then keeper Antony Panizzi and
his assistant Thomas Watts, the aim of building up ‘the best collection of books in every European language outside the countries of origin’. That process continues today and we endeavour to create a representative collection of modern literature, research-level monographs and serials published from the Nordic region. However, Nordic material has been ever-present in our collections since the foundation of the Library of the British Museum in 1759. The collections that founded the library contained just over a thousand items from the region, largely from the library of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), although mainly those in Latin rather than in the vernacular. Particularly well represented were books in fields like medicine, the natural sciences, antiquities, history and topography, philosophy, theology, and
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