THE BIOGRAPHERS’ Library A surprising number of biographers have held important posts at The London Library, which reflects the significance of the collection of volumes on the subject, as Jane Ridley observes Proust’s biographer George Painter once described The London Library as a tower, starting from the underground inferno of topography and history, rising through Middle Earth’s obscure wood of all sciences and all literature in all languages to ‘the mount of Purgatory of biography, where souls relive their sins and are pardoned’ , and then on up to the heavenly floors of philosophy and theology. To biographers,
Have asked Watts Gallery for a verison of this. Painting owned by NPG will be £££
14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
however, the Biography floors are not purgatory but paradise: home to what Lytton Strachey described as ‘those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead’ and much else besides – diaries, memoirs, scholarly editions of letters. Readers use these floors a lot, but no one thinks much about them. The Biography collection comprises 1.69 miles of books – that is how they
measure books here, in miles – and it represents roughly 10 per cent of the Library’s 17 miles of open stacks. To find out more I visited Gill Turner, Head of Acquisitions. We met in a small room next to her office, an eyrie high up in the Library opposite the Members’ Room on the sixth floor. Gill explained that exactly how many books there are in Biog. isn’t known, as online cataloguing is not yet completed. The staff estimate that there is a total of 100,000 volumes, probably more. The figures refer to volumes as opposed to titles, as many biographies are multi-volume works – an extreme example is Martin Gilbert’s Churchill biography, which consists of eight volumes and seventeen Companion Volumes of Churchill documents, published between 1967 and 2014. Biography is the third biggest openstack collection in the Library after History and Literature, both of which come in at
Far left Charles Hagberg Wright, Librarian 1893–1940. Left Leslie Stephen, President 1892–1904. Opposite Photograph on the staircase of T.S. Eliot, President 1952–65.
