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R A Y M O N D A N T RO B U S Harriet Evans October 2021
The Archive Uncovered Nº 51
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CO N T EN T S DISPATCHES
D. Welcome from the Director
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D. News
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The Back Stacks’ centenary Let there be light The 180th AGM Partnering with PEN £500 short story prize announced Season’s greetings
FEATURES
D. Corner of the Library
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D. A lasting legacy
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Writer Daisy Goodwin on wills, legacies and flash fiction
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F. It’s complicated
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F. Facts and fiction
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F. A history in the making
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Poet Raymond Antrobus on deafness, Dickens and colonial baggage Bestseller Harriet Evans is fuelled by knowledge from the Library shelves The Library’s collection is an embarrassment of riches, finds archivist Nathalie Belkin
LAST WORDS
L. Events
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L. Annual report
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L. Meet a member
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Carole Angier and Inua Ellams are on the bill as in-person events return to the Reading Room
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Treasurer Philip Broadley assesses the effects of the pandemic Writer and producer Richard Dove
“I can’t imagine life without The London Library” - Lady Antonia Fraser
Leave a Gift in your will to The London Library Remembering The London Library in your will is an incredible way to safeguard its unique collection and ensure it continues to inspire the readers, writers and thinkers of the future. Find out more about leaving a lasting legacy with a gift in your will and the vital difference this could make at londonlibrary.co.uk/legacies. If you would like to discuss leaving a gift or let us know your intentions, please email legacy@londonlibrary.co.uk or call 020 7766 4795.
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FOR THE LONDON LIBRARY Julian Lloyd Head of Communications Felicity Nelson Membership Director The London Library 14 St James’s Square London SW1Y 4LG (020) 7766 4700 magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk EDITORIAL: CULTURESHOCK Contributors Edward Behrens, Rachel Potts, Alexander Morrison Photography Georgie Dallas (cover), Hanna Gabler Art Director Alfonso Iacurci Designer Thomas Carlile Production Editor Richard Jordan Publisher Phil Allison Production Manager Nicola Vanstone Advertising Sales Cultureshock (020) 7735 9263 The London Library Magazine is published by Cultureshock on behalf of The London Library © 2021. All rights reserved. Charity No. 312175. Cultureshock 27b Tradescant Road London SW8 1XD (020) 7735 9263 cultureshockmedia.co.uk @cultureshockit
The views expressed in the pages of The London Library Magazine are not necessarily those of The London Library. The magazine does not accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. While every effort has been made to identify copyright holders, some omissions may occur. ISSN 2398-4201
W EL CO M E A source of inspiration… Welcome to the autumn 2021 issue of The London Library Magazine. We speak to the award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus and bestselling author Harriet Evans, who both offer candid insights into the highs and lows of the writer’s life and explore where they get their inspiration – the shelves of The London Library providing a notable source. Also, our archivist Nathalie Belkin offers her thoughts on the richness of the Library’s institutional archive, which she has now catalogued for the first time – making this unique resource more widely available for research. This issue also enables us to reflect on an extraordinary year. On page 38, Treasurer Philip Broadley reviews the Library’s operations and finances, and the story is an encouraging one. Despite challenging circumstances, we’ve continued to reduce our operating deficit and to grow membership, while ensuring that our collection has been accessible and widely used. I’m extremely grateful for the support we’ve received from members and staff to enable this to happen. Our AGM takes place on 15 November and I hope you can join us either in the Reading Room or online. Our encouraging financial performance has also been underpinned by generous donations and legacies – notably that of Christopher Smith, who left the Library £1.1 million. Library Trustee Daisy Goodwin reminds us how important legacies are to the Library and launches a flash fiction competition on the theme of “How you want to be remembered” – find out details on page 10. I am delighted to announce our new partnership with English PEN (which includes support for its Writers in Exile programme) and to be going into autumn with a packed events schedule. Almost all will be livestreamed and, excitingly, we are now able to open up the Reading Room for in-person audiences, too. Members have been making good use of the Library since Covid restrictions relaxed in July and we look forward to seeing even more of you soon.
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Philip Marshall, Director
©Shelter, the National Campaign for Homeless People Limited 2021. Registered charity in England & Wales (263710) and Scotland (SC002327).
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NEWS
T H E B A C K S TA C K S ’ C E N T E N A R Y The glass-floored marvel celebrates a milestone
This November, the glass-floored Back Stacks will have been in operation for a century. Opened in 1921 and designed by architect James Osborne Smith, they house more than 200,000 books from the History, and Science and Miscellaneous collections, run to seven floors, and like their iron-grille, 1890 neighbours, feature towers of steel-framed bookstacks running the building’s full height. The one-inch-thick opaque glass floors – cheaper than metal grilles – and their steel frames were shipped in kit form from America, and assembled in a purpose-built brick building that at first featured a 60 ft-long open air walkway (long since dismantled) providing access to the upper floors of the St James’s Stacks. The Daily Express
reported a stipulation from the council that its sides “should be protected by wire netting in case children or dogs fell through on the skylights below”. Construction was completed in less than a year at a cost of £24,000, doubling the Library’s capacity at the time to over 400,000 books. At the building’s opening, Librarian Charles Hagberg Wright told the press: “The glass is very strong. We tested it by dropping from a height a heavy steel shelf”. The interview gave rise to the catchy Daily Mail headline: “Library Glass Floor – Intact after heavy shelf fell on it”.
Photo: Christopher Simon Sykes
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NEWS
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Photo: Hanna Gabler
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NEWS
LET THERE BE LIGHT The Library Fund is raising money for an enhanced new lighting system The 2021/22 Library Fund appeal is raising funds to replace lighting in the Library’s bookstacks. A new system, based on LED fittings and passive infrared sensors, will cut the Library’s total electricity use by 20% – a big step towards a financially and environmentally sustainable future – while making the stacks more welcoming and usable. Parts of the existing system are more than 30 years old and inefficient fittings waste energy. Pullcord operation means lights are often left on when not in use – Turn Off the Lights signage found in the stacks points to a long-standing problem. The current system also shines inconsistent light, with bright spots and darker corners out of reach of light
altogether. Fluorescent bulbs emit harmful ultraviolet rays that damage books and infrared heat that degrades bindings and paper over time. The 2021/22 Library Fund follows successful campaigns in support of the Red Staircase toilet refurbishment and the Library’s Covid-19 response, and aims to raise just over £150,000 to replace existing lighting systems in the Back Stacks, the St James’s Building, the Central Stacks and the Basement.
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To find out more and donate to The Library Fund visit londonlibrary.co.uk/library-fund
T H E 1 8 0 T H AG M Taking place at 6pm on 15 November, the Library’s 180th Annual General Meeting will see Trustees propose an increase of £15 (2.8%) to ordinary annual membership, in line with expected inflation, bringing it to £555 per annum from January 2022, reduced to £525 for those paying by annual direct debit. A proportionate increase is proposed for all other forms of membership, with annual direct debit discounts available for most. Sophie Murray retires as a Trustee at this AGM and we thank her for her time and commitment to the Library on the main Board and various committees. The Trustees decided not to embark on elections this year as there will be more Trustee vacancies next year; recruitment for those places will start early in 2022, so please consider applying. We expect to be able to offer attendance to this year’s AGM both in person (in the Reading Room) and online. We look forward to seeing you in November.
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View details on the 2021 AGM at londonlibrary. co.uk/about-us/agm-annual-reports
The Library entrance. Photo: Simon Brown
NEWS
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PA RT N ER I N G W I T H P EN
S E A S O N ’ S G R EE T I N G S
The Library has launched a three-year partnership with English PEN, which marks its centenary this year. The founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers’ association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries, English PEN has been closely connected to the Library throughout its first century: the first two Presidents of English PEN – John Galsworthy and HG Wells – were Library life members, and Rebecca West and Harold Pinter played prominent roles in its development. The Library will support PEN’s work with exiled writers and international writers at risk by offering five complimentary memberships and full access to the collection. Joint events will also be run, while English PEN will be offered institutional membership and the Library will become a Silver PEN partner. The PEN charter states that “Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals”. The Library is delighted to be developing its longstanding association with the organisation that has done so much to promote these aims. English PEN’s year-long centenary programme, Common Currency, features events, residencies, campaigns and conversations across the UK and Ireland.
The 2021 London Library Christmas card is designed by illustrator Vanessa Lovegrove and will soon be available to order via londonlibrary.co.uk/Xmas21. Lovegrove is a Bristol-based illustrator who worked as a children’s book designer before moving on to freelance illustration. Her own award-winning first picture book, Mind Hug, was published in 2017, and her work expresses a genuine love of character and narrative through the use of mark-making and texture. Her festive card for the Library features the Reading Room on a winter’s evening – a cosy haven for all bibliophiles. The cards are a great way to say “Merry Christmas” to the booklovers in your life and all proceeds go towards supporting the work of The London Library. A pack of 8 cards and envelopes costs £8 including postage within mainland UK.
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£500 S H O RT S T O RY P R I Z E A N N O U N C ED The Library has launched a “flash fiction” story competition sponsored by Library Trustee Daisy Goodwin. She outlines in this issue of the magazine the importance of legacies to the Library, and those donors who have enabled others to benefit from what they cherished about the Library during their lives (see page 10). The Library’s “flash fiction” competition invites members to produce a story, in just six words, on the theme of “How you want to be remembered”. The deadline for submissions is 12 November 2021 and the winner will be announced in December. We’ll also be publishing the winning entry and a runners-up shortlist in our December newsletter and in the next issue of the magazine.
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Visit londonlibrary.co.uk/flashfiction to find out more
Photo: Vanessa Lovegrove/The London Library
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CO R N ER O F T H E LI B R A RY Robert Adam’s centrepiece came first, the room came later
The Library is full of surprising and beautiful objects, perhaps none grander than the Robert Adam fireplace that takes pride of place in the Sackler Study next to the Reading Room. While the fireplace is over 250 years old, the Study in which it is housed – bearing all the hallmarks of 18th-century classicism – is in fact a 1930s fake, specifically designed by architects Mewès & Davis (whose work included the Ritz Hotel) to accommodate the marble fireplace at its centre. The fireplace had originally been a feature in Lansdowne House in Mayfair, a mansion Adam designed for the Earl of Bute in the early 1760s, and which was subsequently occupied by tenants including prime ministers William Pitt and Lord Rosebery.
In the 1930s, Lansdowne House was part-demolished when Westminster Council built a road from Berkeley Square to Curzon Street. One of Adam’s three drawing rooms was removed and installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Dining Room went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Along the way, Henry Yates Thompson, collector of illuminated manuscripts and publisher/owner of the Pall Mall Gazette, acquired the Adam fireplace. Five years after his death, his widow donated it to the Library and at short notice Mewès & Davis developed their classical design to show off the splendid object to best effect.
Detail of the Robert Adam fireplace
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A L A S T I N G LE G AC Y Writer Daisy Goodwin encourages a spirit of giving and introduces a new literary competition
I think the first time I felt truly adult was leaving the solicitor’s office having made my will. As a mother of two, making a will was something I was always meaning to get to. But then a friend of mine died suddenly, intestate, and after witnessing the extra layers of misery and expense that meant for his widow and children, I realised that I couldn’t deny my mortality any longer. That will was all about protecting my children; but now that they have grown up, I have been thinking about redrafting it – as a writer, I would like my last words
to resonate. Of course, some writers have used their wills to do more than dispose of their property. Was Shakespeare’s bequest of his “second best bed” to his wife Anne Hathaway a nod to her comfort, or a hint to posterity about the state of his marriage? The waspish Edwardian writer Ivy Compton Burnett wrote a codicil to her will leaving mirrors to 12 writer friends – an act of generosity, or a comment on the narcissism of novelists? But I would like my will to be benign: after providing for my children, I want to leave some trace behind me,
Legacies make a real difference to the future of the Library and its members. Photo: Chris Tubbs
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besides my DNA. Serving as a Library Trustee has given me some insight into how a gift in a will can do that. At a board meeting in the middle of a very dark January 2021, at a time when the Library was struggling with the costs of Covid, there was a ray of light when the Treasurer announced that life member Christopher Smith had left his entire estate (a seven-figure sum) to The London Library. Sadly he didn’t leave any explanation as to why the Library was so important to him, but as a country member living in Cornwall, who visited a couple of times a year, one can only imagine that the Library was for him, as it is for so many people, a haven – what Portia in The Merchant of Venice calls “a good deed in a naughty world”. The Library has decided to honour Smith’s generosity by setting up a fund in his name. It will be used to protect and preserve the collection, which will in turn provide resource and inspiration for all of our readers and writers in membership, a lasting gift with an impact on future writers and their works. How appropriate if the gifts to the Library of Smith and others including Gillian Comins and Percy Steven should underwrite the difficult first steps for new generations of writers. I am certainly going to write the Library into my will; even if my gift isn’t quite in the Christopher Smith league, I know from my work as a Trustee that leaving a percentage of my estate, however small, will make a real difference to the future of the Library. I would like to think that in 50 years, someone cosseted by shelves of French and German literature at a desk overlooking St James’s Square will be able to find their creative rhythm just as I have done. To encourage members to think about how they might like to be remembered and whether the Library could play a part in that, I am sponsoring a Library competition with a prize of £500 for the best piece of flash fiction on the theme of “How you want to be remembered”. Flash fiction is the ultimate compression – telling a story in no more than six words. The most famous example is attributed to Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That’s something to ponder as you wait for the Issue Hall lift. The deadline for submissions is 12 November 2021, and the winner will be announced in December and published in the newsletter and the next issue of the magazine. If, like me, you want to be remembered by the ongoing work of the Library, then the easiest way is to write a codicil to your will – and if you want to have a taste of heaven on earth, do let the team know of your intentions,
“I would like to think that in 50 years, someone at a desk overlooking St James’s Square will be able to find their creative rhythm just as I have done”
as there are all kinds of special events planned to thank you for your generosity. Remember, you can leave gifts other than money. JM Barrie famously left the rights to Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Who knows, perhaps that neglected second novel could inspire a bestselling video game of the future and ensure the Library’s place as a centre of literary life into the 22nd century? In six words: “All gifts, whatever size, gratefully received.” To find out more about leaving a gift to The London Library in your will, please get in touch with the Fundraising Team at legacy@londonlibrary.co.uk or telephone 020 7766 4795. If you have already left a gift to the Library, thank you. It is very helpful for us to know when someone is planning to leave a legacy to the Library, so please consider letting us know your intentions using the contact details above. We would be delighted to have the opportunity to thank you for your generosity, invite you to special supporters’ events and send you advance updates on important developments at the Library.
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Visit londonlibrary.co.uk/flashfiction to find out more about the Library’s flash fiction competition
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IT’S COMPLICATED
As he publishes a follow up to his acclaimed first book, London-born poet Raymond Antrobus is troubled and fascinated by language, history and what he discovered on a Library shelf
Raymond Antrobus at the Library. Photo: Taormina Miller
THE LONDON LIBRARY
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he prose poem Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated by the British poet Raymond Antrobus begins with a sign language lesson: … if you are crying and someone asks, “are you crying?” you must answer with a smile and nod to affirm, “yes, crying”.
The poem refers to the short story, Doctor Marigold, by Charles Dickens, which is about a London street trader who adopts a deaf girl and learns to communicate with her. She grows up, marries and becomes pregnant. Antrobus’s poem continues: Let’s love that Sophy and Doctor Marigold invent their own home signs. Let’s love that Sophy goes to deaf school, learns to read. Let’s laugh when two deaf people fall in love. Let’s laugh when Sophy writes a letter to Doctor Marigold hoping the child is not born deaf. It is not the only work in which he explores contradictions and oppositions, and not the only past text on deafness with which Antrobus has directly engaged. He was diagnosed as deaf when he was six – he can hear some frequencies and uses powerful hearing aids. Communication, power and inclusion are themes that run through his work: an acclaimed first chapbook and follow-up pamphlet, To Sweeten Bitter (2017), and a first book collection, The Perseverance (2018) – named partly after the Hackney pub in which his father used to drink – that won accolades including the Ted Hughes Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize, the first poetry work to do so. Hughes himself appears in it. His poem Deaf School is published entirely redacted; a subsequent piece by Antrobus reworks quotes from it (“Ted is alert and simple”). Antrobus also includes a section of a lecture given by Alexander Graham Bell, with the majority of the original text erased. Graham Bell was a powerful advocate for oralism, teaching
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Antrobus performs at an Out-Spoken poetry event in London, 2019. Photo: Courtesy of Out-Spoken
RUNNING HEAD
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deaf people to speak rather than sign, which he found primitive. Antrobus’s version of the lecture leaves fragments to reveal a hidden truth behind Graham Bell’s words such as “His incorrect instrument”. He calls the original lecture, like Deaf School, “a harmful document, a dangerous document.” Reading an 1843 notebook of Charles Dickens’ in The London Library, on the other hand, Antrobus felt, “what a tender, curious, sensitive man in some ways.” Unlike Hughes and Graham Bell, Dickens sought out deaf people to interview, to explore beyond his own worldview. The work might be problematic, sentimental, but “first and foremost, he was a storyteller,” says Antrobus. “He was looking for stories which would complicate the human experience.” Something else about Dickens resonates with Antrobus – he was a performer who “understood the power of his body and his voice in his work, [which] also makes me gravitate towards him.” Antrobus broke through on London’s spoken-word circuit aged 17. He teaches alongside his writing – first in mainstream schools and more recently moving into deaf education (after reading that 75% of people born profoundly deaf in the UK are classified as illiterate) – and sees writing, teaching and performing as indivisible. Growing up, Antrobus’s Jamaican father would record poems from the radio onto cassette tapes – including from dub poets Miss Lou, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Michael Smith – and play them back, then ask Antrobus to recite them. His English mother read him William Blake aloud. He saw Adrian Mitchell reciting poetry through a megaphone at anti-Apartheid marches, and “never separated an engagement with literature from an engagement with performance”. Antrobus doesn’t class himself as a native British Sign Language (BSL) speaker, as he underwent speech therapy before learning to sign aged 11. BSL still has no legal status in Britain, unlike Welsh or Gaelic, a sign that the struggle for an acceptance of deafness as “a positive value”, as the late American psychologist Harlan Lane put it, with its own culture and ethnicity rooted in sign language, is ongoing. All the Names Given. Photo: Courtesy of Picador
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“There are people who believe that because of the, in some ways colonial baggage of the hearing world, you will find more purity and more space for yourself in the deaf world, if you turn off your voice and just sign,” Antrobus says. “I know people who made that choice – for some that’s a political decision and for others it’s practical. I’ve been someone who tries to place myself in both of those worlds.” With mixed race heritage – his poem Jamaican British is on the GCSE syllabus – Antrobus once said that he needs a “quadruple consciousness”, drawing on WEB Du Bois’s notion of the “double consciousness” that Black people require in a white world. Antrobus’s poem Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris finds him in a New York café, when a black policewoman enters, carrying weapons. The poet is thinking about a young, black, deaf man recently shot by police and killed, and the last word he learned in American Sign Language: “Alive – both thumbs pointing at your lower abdominal, index fingers pointing up like two guns in the sky.” Antrobus has talked before about mixed feelings in relation to the spoken word scene and its associations, often limited and perhaps racist, telling a Poetry Foundation podcast: “My engagement with literature was almost erased. It’s like this assumption that, ‘Ah, ok you do spoken word, so you’re going to know about rappers... It’s like, ‘Well, yes, and this’ – you know, ‘Yes Jay Z, yes [Jamaican poet] Andrew Salkey’”. He likes to think of poetry by definition as “figurative language with a shape. If you take away any of the baggage that poetry has, of being this very elite, grand venture, then just call it [that], I think that allows more people in.” The rise of spoken word has continued to open fault lines in the poetry establishment that someone like Adrian Mitchell was keen to crack in the 1980s and 90s – for example, Rebecca Watts writing in PN Review in 2018 about an “open denigration of intellectual engagement” by a new generation of popular, young poets finding audiences on YouTube. “I’m not trying to simplify anything,” says Antrobus. “I think the work is still complicated and
IT’S COMPLICATED
“If you take away any of the baggage that poetry has, of being this very elite venture, that allows more people in”
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Photo: Taormina Miller
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IT’S COMPLICATED
“This is the thing with knowledge – as well as finding out more about the atrocities, it complicates the victories, the harmonies” engages with capital ‘L’ literature. And I don’t think that what I’m writing is propaganda, I generally don’t have my own agendas with it. I really am trying to figure something out and my belief is I can figure it out through language.” The real-world impact of the language that we have access to is not lost on him. Speaking on Radio 4 in 2019, Antrobus said, “writing poetry, being a poet, finding ways to articulate who I am to the world has manifested a different kind of world for me.” Antrobus joined The London Library in 2017. He had been studying and practicing teaching, but wanted to write more, and what he found was unexpected. “It’s funny, libraries are meant to be really quiet places,” he says, “but sometimes I had to take the books away and read them where I could slam my fists on a table or shout.” He had looked up the shelf on deafness, where he discovered “books that I didn’t find anywhere else” – and he read all of them. Associations between signing and primitivism were a constant thread. He took in deaf education from the 17th to the 20th century, Goya learning sign language after going deaf, and Queen Victoria’s advocacy for deaf schools (she also learned sign language). There is also a “murky” history of Helen Keller, the American advocate for the blind and deaf whose picture Antrobus remembers on the walls of his deaf school. “This is the thing with knowledge,” he says. “As well as finding out more about the atrocities, it complicates the victories, the harmonies.” He says he’s unsure how this material will work through him and into his work, but a newly published collection, All The Names Given, may provide some answers. He was married in 2019 to an American, and recently spent time there teaching, particularly in Oklahoma. One new poem drew on texts between him and his wife while they
were separated for months during lockdown – 800 pages of which were used as evidence in his green card application (“Tabitha; y haven’t u told me u luv me/Raymond; I’m literally writing you love poems”). How power plays out in society has been under the microscope more than ever in the time between his two books being published. Did being in America reveal better or different ways of meeting the challenges of inequality? “I’m baffled and in awe of the kind of linguistic gymnastics English people are doing to separate themselves from [America],” he says. “You think that England isn’t complicit in what’s happening [there]? It’s literally the same thing.” As a teenager moving around in London, he was frequently stopped and searched, or watched, by police, and in the US, “It feels the same, like you have to be cautious and aware… you have to know how you’ll be read. The difference is the police are armed.” The response to the slurs that followed the England football team’s defeat in the European Football Championship finals angered him: “Covering up the hate graffiti, instead of actually talking about it, there’s a real prism to enter there, a real reality. You can talk about the history – those aren’t just American words.” The etymology of his own name features in the new collection, which explores more his relationship with his English mother, rather than his father, whose death shortly before The Perseverance coloured that book a great deal. Antrobus travelled to Cheshire to uncover more about his surname, which is maternal. Naturally, the “most documented” early Antrobus was the wealthiest. “Guess how he got rich?” he asks. All The Names Given is out now, published by Picador
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FACTS AND FICTION
As with all her books, serious research has gone into Harriet Evans’ latest novel. The hugely successful fiction writer discusses bees, Bridget Jones and how attitudes in the industry need to change
Harriet Evans in the Stacks. Photo: Hanna Gabler
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I
t doesn’t take Harriet Evans long to answer the question: what makes a great book? “It’s that when you open the pages, the author has created a world that you’re in and you don’t ever feel it slip away,” she says. And Evans should know. To date, she has published 13 books, all of them bestsellers. First lines include: “The day Martha Winter decided to tear her family apart began like any other day.” She is a deft hand at the elevator pitch, and gets frustrated at those who dismiss them (“Everyone can sum up their book… Even A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times, the worst of times; it’s the French Revolution. Get over yourself ”). She bills her new novel, The Beloved Girls, as “Daphne du Maurier meets The Wicker Man, with bees”. Evans might be a master of commercial fiction but finds today’s publishing categories tricky. Growing up, her father was an editor at Hodder & Stoughton, as well as an author of thrillers, and her mother became editorial director at Transworld – working with Jilly Cooper, Joanna Trollope and Sophie Kinsella. Their house was filled with books. Was popular fiction prevalent? “That’s too reductive,” she says. “There were Penguin Classics everywhere and what would you say Dickens is? Or Conrad? What would you say Evelyn Waugh is?” The London Library’s fiction section provides a case in point. “When you walk through, there are hilarious books by the most popular novelists of the day when the Library opened. And you could say, is that necessarily reflected in all the books being acquired for the Library today? I’d say maybe not so much.” In 1996, having passed up on early aspirations to be an actress in musicals, and following a short stint at The Lady magazine, Evans joined the publishing world herself. She started out as a secretary at Heinemann, then months later joined Penguin and rose up the ranks as an editor, working with, among others, Sue Townsend on Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years. “Sue massively changed my way of thinking about everything,” Evans says. “She’s basically a communist but read The Daily Telegraph because the foreign reporting and the sports coverage was really good, and she said if you just read The Guardian when you’re left wing, you’re not being challenged. Don’t you agree we would all be in a much better place if people did that?” Hugely influential, too, was Marian Keyes, who Evans worked with as a junior editor and who was writing “some of the best, most devastating books I’d ever read”, though she was labelled “chick lit… or a bit silly”. Evans says that in its true form, chick lit is “really great and refreshing” – particularly for a young woman starting out in London in the 90s and, “for the first time, reading books where people went and got curries with their friends on a Friday night, The Beloved Girls. Photo: Courtesy of Headline
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Evans in the Library’s fiction section. Photo: Hanna Gabler
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drank too much, had fun, were looking for love, working in a really exciting environment, not that sure about how their lives would pan out.” Evans made her own first move into writing during what she describes as the “boom and bust” era of this genre. “Every journalist and society ‘It’ girl would be thinking, ‘I’ve seen Helen Fielding do it, I can do it,’ and not appreciate that Bridget Jones is an English comic classic.” Many submissions she received were “great”, but others weren’t, and one particularly bad work sold for a lot of money. Airing her opinion to her sales director at Penguin, she was told to give it a go herself and she hasn’t looked back. First writing books in her spare time before work, she decided to leave her second publishing job, at Hachette, in 2009. Though she admires “really sharp romcoms”, she feels that her skills lie elsewhere. Hugh Grant’s job in Four Weddings and a Funeral “is irrelevant because it’s this really tight [work], but I’m always interested in the stories that have gone before… of a bit more of the archaeological layers.” At the heart of this has been The London Library, to which she was introduced by her husband, Chris, who worked in finance at the time and would visit in his lunch hour. It became a haven for research. Today, it is her “absolute favourite place in the world”, the only reason she worried about leaving London for Bath in 2019, and somewhere where, upon returning in July, she cried. Writing The Butterfly Summer, which features a forgotten house on a creek in remote Cornwall, she was in “the science and nature part of the Library until Photo: Hanna Gabler
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FACTS AND FICTION
as late as I possibly could be looking up all these really random Victorian books on Lepidoptera”. For a book she is currently working on about a family moving to Hampstead in the 1960s, Peter Cook’s biography proved fertile. “I read the whole thing, which is super depressing,” she says. “Don’t ever be a big star at the age of 22 because your life will just be crap afterwards. But the setting; what was happening to British media then; what people were wearing, what their house looked like… it just sparks all these ideas.” A previous evocation of this period in her third novel, Love Always, caught the eye of The Independent in 2011: “It’s the 60s section of the novel, as related in [heroine] Cecily’s teen diary, that marks Evans out as a writer of top-drawer popular fiction. This sunny coming-of-age drama darkens at every turn...” Evans has a special notebook in which she creates floor plans for her novels, and she says, “geekiness is the greatest gift of all.” With The Beloved Girls, it has allowed her to write with great confidence about bees – “Honey bees freak me out, but God they are so fascinating” – and integrate them into a story about a family ritual stretching back hundreds of years. As she says, “[mine] may be books that are sold in supermarkets, but they need to be really fricking good. And that’s for me to work out so that you only see the readable plot side, not the research that went into it.” She studied art history at A level and “loved what it taught me in terms of how you look [at things]”, but has also always had a fondness for what grips in a narrative. “One of my favourite possessions when I was around 13 was a magazine called Britain’s Lost Treasures – it was the palaces, the crowns, the missing plays, the rings... all this stuff that’s existed, but we’ve lost and no one knows where it is.” Evans feels that prosaic elements of her fiction are also key, with her pandemic life filled with “a tedious cycle of WhatsApp groups about play dates. To be able to laugh about it with people in the same boat has been really helpful, but to be able to read about it has been helpful, too. I had an editor about two books ago – a really, really good editor – and she took out some of the domestic detail. It wasn’t a book about domestic drudgery per se, and normally I love being edited, but I said, ‘The school-mum-gate stuff is the bit that people will respond to.’” Less than the label of women’s fiction itself, she takes issue with the fact that “really good books by women about women’s lives aren’t taken seriously. No single piece of what’s called commercial women’s fiction is regularly reviewed in a broadsheet. I find it interesting the way that I, who have been a Richard and Judy top-10 bestseller and won prizes, am treated compared with someone who’s written a thriller about a criminal mastermind who makes a dressing gown out of women’s bodies. You’re like, ‘Sure, that should be at a literary festival.’” Evans thinks that the conversation has moved forward, but not enough. Nevertheless, she’ll continue to write work that grips, and that also evokes lived experiences and serves as a reminder of the power of commercial fiction, whoever is writing it. All that matters, she says, is that she’s written a “really great book that will stand the test of time. If it’s good, then there’s some peace in that.” The Beloved Girls is out now, published by Headline
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§ 27
A HISTORY IN THE MAKING Archivist Nathalie Belkin has inventoried the Library’s institutional collection for the first time – and made some fascinating discoveries
Nathalie Belkin in the Library. All photos by Hanna Gabler
THE LONDON LIBRARY
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“I
am much flattered that the Committee of The London Library, doubtless under the instigation of their august chairman, should have invited me to address them at the Annual Meeting. I should very much like to accept, but I don’t see how I can since… just at that time of the year, my house is, as usual, pretty well full of visitors.” So wrote Somerset Maugham in May 1954, in a letter to the diplomat and Library committee member Harold Nicolson. It’s among the items to be found in the Library’s own archive, fully catalogued for the first time by Nathalie Belkin. Since 2019, she has scoured 14 St James’s Square to inventory thousands of items, which span meeting minutes to member lists. Here, she reveals what she has discovered so far about the Library and its orbit. What’s in the archive, and can you name any highlights? There are many highlights, but a particular favourite is member correspondence by people like EM Forster, Rudyard Kipling and TS Eliot. We also have minutes, beginning with the Library as an idea and a desire; and the early subject catalogue, which is unique and created from scratch by Secretary and Librarian Charles Hagberg Wright and his deputy, Christopher J. Purnell. It’s in use to this day. There are visitor books – one entry shows Ralph Waldo Emerson visited in 1873 to meet founding members on his last ever trip overseas. I’ve always loved Emerson and found this quite exciting. It shows how the Library had a far-reaching effect around the world.
Who had the worst handwriting? A great deal of 20th-century handwriting was difficult to read. Aldous Huxley’s is a little bit all over the place, but EM Forster’s was one of the hardest. I’ve used Transkribus [AI-powered text recognition software for historic documents] to read his and even that had a spot of bother. Was the Library aware of this material before you started work? People were aware of the minutes, annual reports and membership books, but not the full extent of what was here. As an example, one of my first finds was a Victorian deed tin in a cupboard – probably one of my favourites because it is so of the time and the place. A number of leases and deeds were folded inside, but still in excellent condition. These included the Library’s first agreement for premises in Pall Mall from 1841, which features a handwritten list of everything the rooms contained. Are there documents relating to the fabric of the building? One example is a handwritten volume titled a Specification of Works by the architect James Osborne Smith, which outlines the Library rebuild in the late 1890s. We have the only copy in existence and it’s just beautiful. We have old blueprints covering extensions and remodels that architecture students regularly request.
Architectural blueprints help trace the Library’s long history of refurbishment and redevelopment
The original Specification of Works detailing architect James Osborne Smith’s plans for the Library’s 1890s rebuild
Member correspondence offers intimate insights into reading habits and more
THE LONDON LIBRARY
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Is there anything you’ve been particularly surprised to find?
That so many Suffragettes were members. I knew families like the Pankhursts and the Fawcetts did belong, but to know that their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters became members and encouraged friends – the Library was a hub during a time when so many places were not accepting of women. My big thing that I tout to everyone is finding Mark Twain was a member. Barbara Cartland was another surprise, not that she was a member, but that she wrote in a letter that she was well-known enough not to need anyone to nominate her. Are there any non-documents? There is a large collection of artefacts and ephemera, from book labels to seal stamps, and some recordings of readings and lectures, including an homage to TS Eliot with the BBC from 1965. Stravinsky wrote a piece for it, Groucho Marx was there. This is all mostly on obsolete media so we’re planning to transcribe it and make it accessible.
What do people want to use the archival material for in your experience? Fiction writers may ask about correspondence I think partly for that Victorian sensibility they reveal: What were the staff like? What was the organisation like? The interaction? Biographers and historians are interested in things like the issue books, which cover the 1840s to the 1850s and contain borrowing records for people including Charles Dickens, Josiah Wedgwood, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin. Formal membership forms took over from handwritten ledgers in the 1870s and some come with character references or letters saying, “Reserve these books.” It’s the story of the social and cultural history of Victorian London. It shows what books were popular, and that it wasn’t just men here, or just the gentry. Many women became members, including Annie Kenny and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson; we had coal miners in the 1930s, civil servants, clergy and teachers.
How can people access the archive in general? I have created a full inventory and all the holdings are in locked stacks in the basement – rehoused in acid-free folders and boxes. Scrapbooking was such a popular thing to do in the Victorian era, but the letters for instance are already degrading because of the glue used and the very cheap paper of the time. The plan is to make it accessible digitally, which will be the first time most of it has been open to researchers. We also hope to expand access beyond Library members – to schools, for instance. The archive contains many writers’ and members’ personal papers meaning we have primary source material on things like the Battle of the Somme and Dunkirk. What makes this archive special? It’s incredibly rich. It touches on day-to-day Library business but also upon various aspects of London, and England’s artistic and literary circles – and there are always discoveries. Once this all becomes digitised I think we’ll find more. Who are the members with stories as yet untold?
Now safely archived, Annual Reports provide a wealth of detail on the Library’s history
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HISTORY IN THE MAKING
“This is the story of the social and cultural history of Victorian London. It shows what books were popular, and that it wasn’t just men here, or just the gentry”
THE LONDON LIBRARY
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“The archive contains many writers’ personal papers, meaning we have primary source material on things like the Battle of the Somme and Dunkirk”
What’s the best thing about being an archivist? I was originally a history and classics major with the intent to go into academia, but I wanted to be more hands-on. Archivists get to dig in, find the stories and conduct research – you take what you have, you look at the history that surrounds the institution and you build a historical record. I also love giving access to people who might have no idea what we have here or how to use it. I get very excited about sharing knowledge. Is it usual, on beginning work in a new archive, to be unaware of its full contents? Not at all, and that goes for all types and sizes of organisations. Bigger places have so much information, it’s almost impossible to work through it all – and have enough people to do the work. I was born in the UK but lived until 2019 in America, and worked as an archivist at the New York City Municipal Archives where I catalogued and created a finding aid for the Brooklyn Bridge blueprints, and worked on NYPD surveillance materials. I also worked on large pallets of mouldy books from the 19th century that had been flooded, and would be in a full hazmat suit looking to see if there was anything salvageable. It was very hard, but also one of the best projects I’ve ever done. I did have to have a tetanus shot afterwards. You could show me the state of any archive – nothing will surprise me.
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A decorated seal stamp is one of many surviving objects from the Library’s early years
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EVENTS For the first time since the pandemic began, events will take place in-person in the Reading Room alongside live streams for virtual viewers. Join in as we celebrate books and writing across multiple genres this season
14 October
21 October
28 October
This is How We Come Back Stronger
The Library: A Fragile History
Black History Month @ The London Library R.A.P Party
The Feminist Book Society’s essential new anthology is an intersectional feminist response to the current crisis, in which structural inequalities have taken on shocking new prominence. Stella Duffy, Rosanna Amako and others discuss the issues and look to the future.
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen discuss their beautifully illustrated new book, the first major history to explore the contested and dramatic history of libraries, from famous ancient collections to the embattled public resources of today. 7.30–8.30pm, in-person
7.30–8.30pm, online
Poet Inua Ellams brings his exhilarating live literature phenomenon the R.A.P (Rhythm and Poetry) Party to The London Library for a nostalgic, no-clutter, no-fuss, evening of hip-hop-inspired poems and favourite hip-hop songs. 7.30-9.30pm, in-person 4 November
Speak, Silence: In search of WG Sebald Carole Angier speaks to Iain Sinclair about her new biography of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, whose extraordinary work addressed profound themes including the burden of the Holocaust, memory, and exile. In partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. 7.30-8.30pm, online and in-person
Inua Ellams; Katy Hessel
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11 November
Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles Travis Elborough discusses his eyeopening new history of spectacles, from their inception as primitive visual aids through to today’s designer eyewear, via encounters with medieval glassmakers, myopic Renaissance rulers, popstars, feminist icons and literary heroes. 7.30-8.30pm, online
AVA I L A B LE N OW T O V I EW O N LI N E
Tenderness: Lawrence, lovers and literature on trial Recorded in Banned Books Week, Alison MacLeod discusses her stunning new novel with Lara Feigel. Tenderness tells the story of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, its ripple effects across half a century and the society that put it on trial.
Power and the Palette: How women artists painted a revolution Katy Hessel of The Great Women Artists Instagram and Podcast speaks to writers Rebecca Birrell and Jennifer Higgie about the women artists throughout history whose self-portraits and still life paintings were inherently, often implicitly, political.
18 November
Checkmate in Berlin with Giles Milton Giles Milton discusses his immersive new history of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II, which fired the starting gun for the Cold War; an unprecedented drama that was to have a profound influence on our modern world and is still felt today. 7.30–8.30pm, in-person
For more information on London Library events, go to londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on or consult the fortnightly e-newsletter
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A Y E A R W I T H O U T PA R A L L E L The Library’s Treasurer, Philip Broadley, reviews the 2020-21 financial year and considers the lasting effects of the pandemic on the Library’s strategic plan
The 2021 annual report tells the financial story of the Library as it navigated its way through two periods of closure and continuing restrictions on operations: truly a year without parallel for the Library, its staff and its members. It is now available to read on the Library’s website. While Trustees had not previously considered a pandemic as a specific risk to the Library’s operations, they had contemplated temporary closure, as a result of fire or flood for instance, and the Library entered the pandemic with cash reserves to withstand a period of disruption. Thanks to the continued support of members, whether in joining, renewing, or supporting our annual appeal and other fundraising initiatives, our operating deficit for the year was less than anticipated in the emergency budget we prepared in the first weeks of the pandemic in April 2020.
CHANGES IN M EM B ER S H I P A N D U S AG E For the third successive year we saw growth in membership, with a net increase of 105 members taking the total number to more than 7,000 for the first time since 2014. We welcomed 1,115 new members in all
categories: the highest number for at least 10 years. Inevitably, given the Library’s periods of closure and, doubtless, the reduction in earnings for many, we saw a significant increase in the number of members choosing not to renew: over 1,000 members left us. The Trustees anticipate that the retention rate will improve and are encouraged to see a net increase of 241 members in the first four months of the current financial year. Library usage changed markedly, accelerating trends we have seen in recent years. For all but a few days at the start of the pandemic, the Library was proud to maintain its postal loans service with normal postage charges waived. The Trustees are grateful to staff who volunteered to come in during lockdowns to provide this service. Postal loans increased five-fold, and, at nearly 23,000, represented more than half of all books loaned. Digital resources saw a significant increase in usage. Members accessed 189,000 articles in JSTOR, one-third more than last year. Over 71,000 articles, an increase of two-thirds, were accessed from the databases subscribed to via ProQuest, such as the Country Life and Guardian archives. In the autumn, the Library began providing eBooks through the OverDrive platform, through which
it currently offers almost 3,000 titles. Between September 2020 and March 2021, 560 individual members borrowed 3,187 eBooks.
OV ER A LL F U N D S I N C R E A S ED S I G N I F I C A N T LY The table opposite summarises the results of the last three years. The Library continues to record an operating deficit, albeit one decreasing in line with our strategic plan. This year it was more than offset through fundraising income and unrealised gains in asset values. Membership and trading income together were £2,844,000, a reduction of 5% on the prior year reflecting the effects of the pandemic on event income and a change in the mix of membership categories. The costs of operating the Library were £4,213,000, an increase of 1% over the prior year. Despite careful control of all costs, there was significant unexpected expenditure required to ensure compliance with government guidelines and safe operation. Fundraising income benefited from a large legacy, discussed later, and members’ generous responses to the Covid appeal contributed over £200,000. During the first lockdown, over half the Library’s
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In spite of the challenges this year, the Library met the objective in its strategic plan to further reduce its operating deficit. This is measured by adding net fundraising income and investment income to the operating result. The deficit for this year was £361,215 and its steady reduction since 2018 is shown in the table below. The Trustees are encouraged by this trend, but consider that the pandemic’s lasting effects will
impede progress in the mediumterm. We anticipate it will be well into 2022 before income from trading and events returns to prepandemic levels, investment income will continue to be lower than previously as the Library’s cash balances are being kept prudently higher, and there will be no further income from the JRS. The budgeted deficit for the year to March 2022 has been set at £418,516 reflecting the Trustees’ continued caution. The Trustees have decided to extend by one year the goal of eliminating the operating deficit to March 2024. The Library’s strategy is otherwise unchanged: a sustainable financial position can be achieved by continuing to recruit and retain members, while increasing fundraising activities and controlling costs. Thanks to the support of members and the commitment of staff, the Library has fared well in the most challenging period for many decades. On behalf of the Trustees, I thank you all.
Result 1,000,000 900,000 800,000
859,000
700,000
736,587
600,000 500,000
557, 956
400,000 361,215
300,000
418,516
200,000 100,000
Core operating deficit (£s)
2022
2021
0 2020
Throughout the year we have received substantial support from donors – vital for an organisation with no regular public funding and reliant on its own fundraising efforts. The Trustees thank everyone who has supported the Library, through the annual fund, gifts of books, Founders’ Circles, or in other ways. Of particular note is the legacy of Christopher Smith, who died during the year. Mr Smith was a life member for many years, had no immediate family, and left his entire estate to the Library to be used for “the care and preservation of books”. Although the estate has not yet been distributed, its estimated value of £1.1m has been included in the result for the year, as accounting standards require. The Trustees have considered carefully how best
O P ER AT I N G D EF I C I T R ED U C E S , B U T O U R G OA L CHANGES
2019
A R EM A R K A B LE LE G AC Y
to apply this bequest in accordance with Mr Smith’s intentions while preserving his memory. The Christopher Smith Fund has been set up to receive his estate and the Trustees intend to apply £70,000 annually from the fund towards collection care. The fund is expected to have a life of roughly 20 years.
2018
staff was placed on furlough at full pay. The Library took advantage of the government’s job retention scheme (JRS) and received £118,000 included within fundraising income. Each year-end, the Library’s financial investments are reported at their market value. Thanks to the marked increase in the value of stock markets over the year we report investment gains of £1,034,000. The Staff Superannuation Fund’s assets also increased by more than its liabilities, giving rise to a gain of over £700,000. Overall, the Library’s funds increased by £2,409,000 and amounted to £30.4 million, of which £5.2 million represents Endowment Funds.
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M EE T A M EM B ER Richard Dove on a late love affair with the Library
After working for years in current affairs, I was approaching my 60th birthday and looking for a place to work on the novel that I’d never got around to. I read an article by Michael Palin about using the Library for research, took the tour, and just found the whole place completely magical. It has that aura about it that inspires, and I thought, “I have to join.” While writing my first novel, Uneven Song, I decided to let the Library help me with the plot; it’s a co-author, really. I knew what my characters were and what they were going to do, but not how they were going to get there, so I would start with a specific shelf mark on insects, say. That would give me a book or two, and then I would turn around and look at the shelf opposite – stuff that I didn’t know was there. It was like wandering in a city with no map; my discoveries included campanology (the study of bells), food additives, bagpipe music, satellite navigation and the history of the A1. I think what defines my career is finding these tangents. I was a print journalist first, specialising in Southeast Asia,
then joined a BBC news training scheme under John Birt and went to work on a business programme for Radio 4. That’s how I found myself sitting on the harbour wall in Penzance with the tin miners before they went on their last shift, and making a radio feature with them. I later worked on breakfast news and TV and after about 10 years at the BBC, helped launch Al Jazeera English, before moving into independent production. My daughter and I have now both had book launches in the Reading Room, and I’ve never been busier; writing more fiction, a nonfiction book about micronations and running the podcast Footnotes, which tries to explore the extraordinary emotional range of classical music via the places that composers went to. We are planning something in the Library – we often think about the writers over the years who have sat here to compose masterpieces, but want to find out about composers: did Edward Elgar pop in for a bit of inspiration? That research will take me to another shelf I haven’t been to.
Photo: Hanna Gabler
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112 Jermyn Street www.emmettlondon.com
