MY DISCOVERY
Leviathan
or the Matter, Forme and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil by thomas hobbes (1651) Charles Saumarez Smith looks back to borrowing a valuable early edition of the philosophical treatise as a student
Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651).
I made most use of The London Library in the early 1980s, when I was a Ph.D. student at the Warburg Institute working on the history of Castle Howard. Quite early on in my research, Joe Trapp, the then Director of the Warburg Institute and its former Librarian, knowing that I was interested in working on two early library catalogues which survived at Castle Howard, took me to a meeting of The Bibliographical Society. He also encouraged me to join The London Library, realising that it would be much richer in early English books than was the Warburg. What I was trying to do was to reconstruct the mental universe of not just John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor as architects, but of Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, who commissioned the house in 1699. What books would he have read? What did he know about architecture? How much interest did he take in the process of design? I had realised that by deducting the books listed in the first catalogue, which had been compiled in 1698 in his house in Soho Square, from the second catalogue which dated from 1715 in Castle Howard, it ought to be possible to find out exactly what books he was reading in the time that the house was being built. This gave me licence to spend a great deal of time combing The London Library stacks for
Of course, it would not be possible now, and should not be. Some time in the 1990s, there was a spate of thefts from private and institutional libraries (the man went to jail) and the librarians sensibly took the precaution of putting early and valuable editions into store, safe from temptation. Now, it can only be read under supervision in the Reading Room, but I still got a frisson from getting it out again one Saturday morning recently and finding that it had indeed been taken out on 3 JUN 1981 (renewed three weeks later), one of only three times it was borrowed between 1976 and 1985. That must have been me. Now, my contact with The London Library is almost exclusively online, searching for periodical articles through JSTOR and using it as a convenient way of gaining access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Who’s Who, with only very occasional dashes from the Royal Academy to the new and magnificent Art Room. I remain a member out of a sense of deep loyalty and gratitude for the days when I was nearly the only person working in the Reading Room other than John Julius Norwich, and was able to roam the stacks from Topography in the basement up to Religion on the sixth floor; and because of the memory that it was possible to find rare books on the open shelves.
rare seventeenth-century books of poetry, history and travel literature. My most vivid memory of this period of my research is that I thought I ought to read Hobbes’s Leviathan – which I had discovered was one of the sources for his interest in deism, and in which Hobbes discusses the basis of religious belief in famously ambiguous terms. I went into the stacks, found an early edition on the open shelves, borrowed it, took it home, and discovered that it was a first edition. (Or at least appeared to be, because I have since discovered that it was, in fact, a copy of the so-called ornaments edition, which was an early eighteenth-century reissue. The Library does, however, have copies of the 1651 edition.) It’s described in my cardindex file from the time as Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London: A Crooke 1651). It left a powerful impression on me that in the late 1970s it was still possible to go to a lending library and borrow a great work of philosophy, unannotated, with a large and legible typeface and heavy leather binding (although the spine had been rebound). Unlike the normally available, later Penguin edition, the volume provided a powerful sensation of what it would have been like to read at the time of its publication.
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13
