HIDDEN CORNERS: Forbidden Pleasures

Aubrey Beardsley’s Lysistrata (detail),from Beardsley’s illustrated edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1896).

Giles Milton explores the Safe Collections, which include not only rare volumes, but a category of ‘forbidden’ books, from the days when the Librarian also played the role of censor

In Umberto Eco’s modern classic, The Name of the Rose (1983), the narrative revolves around a monastic library that is structured as a labyrinth. On the shelves of this library are scores of forbidden works kept hidden from prying eyes. Among them is Aristotle’s Second Book of Poetics, the only surviving copy from classical antiquity.

The London Library cannot boast such a rarity, but it will come as a surprise to many members that it does have its very own section of ‘forbidden’ works. If you find a book once catalogued under the shelfmark ‘Librarian’s Room’ (or even ‘Librarian’s Room Drawer’), prepare yourself for a hot flush. These include the books that an early Librarian once considered so (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) naughty that there was only one place for them: his personal drawer.

The Librarian’s Room books are still kept under lock and key: these days, they form a part of the Safe Collections. They are a quaint survival from the days when the Librarian – always male – had a role in deciding what we should, and should not, be allowed to browse. (All of these books could be borrowed, but they were first wrapped in brown paper before being handed over to members.)

The Librarian exercised the censor’s role until quite recently. The Transvestite Memoirs of the Abbé de Choisy (1862) was locked away as late as 1973, while Louis Henriques’s Love in Action (1959) was removed from circulation ten years earlier.

An unexpected (and delightful) forbidden treasure is Emmanuelle l’antivierge, the 1959 French original of Emmanuelle the AntiVirgin, by Emmanuelle Arsan, whose pen name was Marayat Rollet-Andriane. I vividly remember the film version (1974): it was required late-night viewing for all teenage boys in the late 1970s.

Aubrey Beardsley’s erotica was confined to the Librarian’s drawer in 1899, while the illustrated Beauty’s Day: les quatre heures de la toilette des dames by the Abbé de Favre, was placed under lock and key in 1890, the year it was published and acquired.

Some of the titles in this little collection are self-explanatory. The Practice of Sex (1939) doesn’t beat around the bush, although I must confess to doing a double-take when I saw the author’s name: A. Willy. Other volumes cry out for further exploration. My eye was drawn to Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in All Countries (1869). In all countries! It’s good to know it’s not just the British who like to whip each other. The book’s author was an Anglican vicar, the Revd William Cooper. The fact that he was a respectable man of the cloth did not prevent his work being locked into the Librarian’s drawer.

Aubrey Beardsley’s erotica was confined to the Librarian’s drawer in 1899, while the illustrated Beauty’s Day: les quatre heures de la toilette des dames by the Abbé de Favre, was placed under lock and key in 1890, the year it was published and acquired.

Some of the titles in this little collection are self-explanatory. The Practice of Sex (1939) doesn’t beat around the bush, although I must confess to doing a double-take when I saw the author’s name: A. Willy. Other volumes cry out for further exploration. My eye was drawn to Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in All Countries (1869). In all countries! It’s good to know it’s not just the British who like to whip each other. The book’s author was an Anglican vicar, the Revd William Cooper. The fact that he was a respectable man of the cloth did not prevent his work being locked into the Librarian’s drawer.

How often, one wonders, did the Librarian furtively open his drawer for a quick peek at the forbidden fruits therein?

Did he secretly thumb The Ten Pleasures of Marriage by A. Marsh (1682)? Did he finger his way through the Registrum librorum eroticorum by Rolf S. Reade (1936)? Did he quietly close the door as he delved into Frank Caprio’s Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism (1954)?

What makes the Librarian’s Room shelfmark so fascinating is the idiosyncratic nature of the stuff. I couldn’t help wondering why Julian Marshall’s The Annals of Tennis (1878) was included in this roster of rude books. I pulled it down from the forbidden shelf – to which I’d been granted special access – half-expecting the title to be a masquerade for something more lewd. But no. It was a rather dull book about tennis. One can only assume that this was the favourite sport of the Librarian of the time and therefore ended up in his drawer.

This eclectic shelfmark provides a fascinating peephole on the changing standards of prudery, but includes just a small number of the books not found on The London Library’s miles of open shelves. The Safe Collections of books kept securely locked away are shaped less by prudery than by prudence: these volumes are deemed so rare and valuable that many of them can only be viewed under supervision.

As every member knows, Thomas Carlyle founded the Library with the intention that all of the books could be borrowed. But as an increasing number of historically important volumes were bequeathed to the collection, it was decided that some of these should be kept under lock and key. Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio is one such example. The idea that a member could borrow it – and take it home on the Tube – was deemed unwise.

So who decides which books are to be put in the Safe Collections? ‘Any book published before 1700 is automatically placed in the safe,’ says Dunia GarcíaOntiveros, Head of Bibliographic Services, who is busily cataloguing these 40,000 or so volumes. ‘Other books are housed there only if they are fragile, very rare or have a special provenance. ’

The Safe Collections have grown so large that they have to be kept in many different rooms spread across the nine floors of the London Library. The majority are in the Anstruther Wing, at the very rear of the building. It has its own temperaturecontrolled environment.

Some of the books in the Anstruther Wing are extremely rare. The enormous first edition 1611 folio of the King James Bible – 10kg of literary genius – is one of these rarities. Even more precious is King Henry VIII’s 1521 Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, a book with a colourful history. The King wrote it as a riposte to Martin Luther’s 1520 De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium and his earlier Ninety-Five Theses (1517). The London Library has both of these Luther tracts in the safe.

Henry VIII’s response to Luther is possibly the Library’s greatest treasure. A vigorous defence of the Catholic faith, it was dedicated to Pope Leo X and printed with a beautiful and highly political titlepage vignette. The Pope was so impressed that he rewarded the King with the title Defender of the Faith. It is the binding that makes the book so special. The original leather is impressed with an exquisite Tudor rose and pomegranate, the latter being the emblem of Catherine of Aragon. It was bought by the Library, together with the rest of the 12,000-volume Allan Library, in the 1920s.

In a different safe, three floors above, is Luther’s 1522 Contra Henricum regem angliae. This is where the argument between the two men got personal, with Luther accusing the English King of having ‘a slavish and impudent and strumpetlike insolence and silliness’ . The volume is illustrated with a magnificent engraved portrait of the author by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Another of the Luther volumes has been bound, at some point in its history, in a beautiful but discarded medieval manuscript. T

he earliest safe books are predominantly religious tracts and bibles, many of them arcane and very rare. The 1584 Biblia það Er Øll Heilóg Ritning vtlógð a Norrænu is, as any Icelandic speaker will tell you, the first Icelandic Bible. There’s also a beautiful 1565 edition of the books of Samuel and Kings in Hungarian and an impressive 1581 Slavonic Bible, complete with a handwritten note as to how it made its way into the collection.

Surprisingly, the Library’s oldest book – and only remaining incunabulum (the majority were sold at a time of financial crisis in the 1960s) – is not a Bible at all, but a collection of poetry by the Florentine poet Girolamo Benivieni. It is quite possible that there are other pre-1501 books waiting to be discovered. Only a fraction of the Safe books have been electronically catalogued. The rest are still to be found in the old printed catalogue, whose Victorian cataloguers were remarkably cavalier when making their entries; they often listed the volumes as ‘n.d. ’ (no date). ‘We don’t know what discoveries we’re going to find in the future, ’ says Dunia. ‘That’s what makes the task ahead so exciting. We might yet find some more fifteenth-century books. ’

It is a humbling experience to walk along the stacks in the Safe and see the first editions of so many literary and historical giants. Tobias Smollett, Benedictus de Spinoza, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift all sit shoulder to shoulder under ‘S’ .

Illustration by Lewis Carroll of his poem 'You are old, Father William', recited by Alice, from the 1886 facsimile edition of the 1864 manuscript of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Elsewhere, in a random wander, I found first editions of John Keats, Carl Linnaeus and the rare 1886 facsimile edition of the 1864 manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated not by John Tenniel but by Lewis Carroll himself.

There is also a small collection of original manuscripts, many of which have yet to be properly studied. The commonplace books of James Mill, John Stuart’s father, written between 1806 and the mid-1820s, surely contain much of interest to any would-be biographer.

Also in the manuscript collection is the commonplace book of Robert Harrison, Librarian from 1857 to 1893. This contains a vivid account of the only member to have committed suicide on the Library premises. His name was Bryan Hunt, son of Thornton

Hunt, first editor of the Daily Telegraph. According to Harrison, Hunt arrived at the Library in May 1875, and made his way up to the Magazine Room. This was at the very rear of the building, where few members ever went. He pulled out a loaded pistol and held it to his head. Seconds later, members heard a muffled shot.

But Hunt was not dead. A few minutes later came a second shot, at which point Robert Harrison was called to the scene. ‘I found brains and blood oozing from his forehead, ’ he recorded in his commonplace book. ‘There was no hope of saving his life. ’ Harrison ran back to the Librarian’s Room, bumping into Thomas Carlyle on the way. He told him that a member had committed suicide. Carlyle, who clearly disliked the Hunt family, showed ‘no symptom of emotion ’ . Indeed, he was heard to utter: ‘Another of Thornton Hunt’s bastards gone. ’

The importance to members of so many of these ‘Safe’ volumes – both printed and unprinted – is not so much their great value but the fact that they can be consulted by each and every one of us. I’ve made use of many of these books in the course of my research.

When investigating the white slave trade, I discovered that the Library had a copy of Pierre Dan’s 1637 Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires. This is a remarkable book that sheds much light on the slave auctions of Morocco, Algiers and Tunis. Dan was a French Redemptionist priest who negotiated ransoms on behalf of the European slaves held captive across Barbary. ‘It was a piteous sight to see them exposed for sale in Algiers, ’ he writes of an Irish family auctioned in the slave market, ‘parting the wife from the husband and the husband from the child’ . The London Library’s edition comes with a splendid 1704 bookplate denoting that it came from the library of Philip Sidney, Earl of Leicester.

Also housed in the Safe Collections is the eclectic collection of pamphlets, randomly bound into hardcover volumes. The Pamphlet Collection is a unique resource, containing essays, ephemera and polemical tracts. Many of these are not available anywhere else: you certainly won’t find all of them in the British Library. This area also holds the unique Claude Montefiore pamphlets (the earliest dates from 1797 and the latest was printed in 1938, the year of Montefiore’s death), a huge collection of essays on subjects that interested the great religious scholar. ‘He collected writings on anything and everything, ’ says Dunia. ‘It’s like gazing into his mind. ’

So how do you get to consult the books, pamphlets and manuscripts that are housed in the Safe Collections? You need to order them from the main issue desk, filling out a form and quite possibly reading the volume under the watchful gaze of a librarian. This enables the Library to keep tabs on the rarest volumes; it also allows them to keep an eye (snigger, snigger) on who’s reading what.

‘Now, sir, which particular book were you wanting to see?’

‘Er … it’s called Love’s Picture Book. And it’s in the Librarian’s drawer. ’

Pierre Dan’s Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires (1637).