The London Library Magazine - Spring 2021

Lucy Jago

Alexandra Pringle A Happy Birthday from members

CONTENTS

DISPATCHES

D. Welcome from the Director 3

D. News 5

Funding the Covid Response Creative Impact Anniversary Adoption Postal Loans

Making Space Picture Project New Voices

D. From the Archive 14

D. Collection Story 16

FEATURES

F. Looking Forward 18

New Library Trustee Yassmin Abdel-Magied is helping the Library in its future-facing mission

F. Celebrating 180 Years of The London Library 24

A host of current Library Members reveal what this unique institution means to them today

F. Case Reopened 34

Novelist Lucy Jago tells the story of a Jacobean scandal from a fresh, female perspective

F. The Modern World 40

Legendary publisher and literary agent Alexandra Pringle reveals how Virago brought overlooked writing to light, with the help of a certain Library

LAST WORDS

L. Events 46

Star names join The London Library Lit Fest online

L. Meet a Member 48

House historian Melanie Backe-Hansen

HENRY SCOTT TUKE

7 June – 12 September

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

Rachel Potts, Alexander Morrison, Greg Morrison

Photography

Elliott Lauren (cover), Greg Morrison

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Alfonso Iacurci

Designer

Thomas Carlile

Production Editor

Richard Jordan

Publisher

Phil Allison

Production Manager

Nicola Vanstone

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WELCOME

Celebrating a special anniversary

Welcome to Issue 50 of The London Library magazine. After a year of extraordinary challenges, we have something very positive to look forward to in 2021 as we celebrate our 180th anniversary and begin the first steps of reopening after lockdown.

Our anniversary opens in style with The London Library Lit Fest over the May Day bank holiday. Speakers across 15 online events include Salman Rushdie, Sarah Waters, Tom Stoppard, Hallie Rubenhold, Simon Schama, Suzannah Lipscomb, Monique Roffey and many others. We hope you will enjoy what promises to be a wonderful weekend.

The festival will highlight how valuable libraries can be to people’s lives, especially as places of discovery, community and refuge. The London Library is no exception and articles in this magazine vividly reflect that – we are delighted to be joined by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Lucy Jago, Alexandra Pringle and Melanie Backe-Hansen, whose fascinating interviews highlight how the Library has helped trigger their discoveries and fuel their imaginations.

The Library’s role in helping to inspire and support the creativity of our members has often been recognised but has never been easy to quantify. We recently commissioned an economic analysis to address that and the results are eye-catching, showing that in 2020, Library members produced an astonishing 700 books, 15,000 articles and 430 scripts and screenplays. The Library’s part in facilitating this creative output is calculated to be worth over £21 million to the UK economy and supports over 450 jobs. We are thrilled to have the wider public benefit of the Library demonstrated in this way and would like to thank everyone who participated in the analysis.

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

Finally, thank you again for all your support for the Library during the last year. We have been moved by the many encouraging messages received from members and by the tremendously generous donations made to our appeal, helping us meet the cost of the pandemic. We are delighted to be reopening our doors again and to welcome you back into the Library. •

Philip Marshall, Director

1965 Rolex GMT-Master Pepsi

Estimate: £15,000

William George & Co

Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger

Estimate: £30,000–50,000 Sotheby’s

George IV silver candlesticks

Estimate: £350–520

Adam’s

Pumpkin, Yayoi Kusama (b.1929)

Hammer price: £550

Forum Auctions

Coffee table, Herman Miller

Estimate: £760–1,150 Wright

Hermès bag Kelly

Starting price: £7,500

Stockholms Auktionsverk

Marble bust

Late 19th/early 20th century

Estimate: £11,500–15,500

Christie’s

Search over 2000 auction houses and galleries from all over the world

FUNDING THE COVID RESPONSE

The Library receives record number of donations for Covid-19 support appeal

May Day V, Andreas Gursky

Estimate: £450,000–650,000

Phillips

Edwardian Art Noveau frame

Estimate: £200–300

Tennants

Your search for ar t, design, antiques and collec tables st ar ts here

Mahogany dresser

Estimate: £500–660

Uppsala Auktionskammare

Swivel chair by Hans J. Wegner

Estimate: £2,460–3,300

Bruun Rasmussen

Emerald cut diamond ring

Fixed price: £27,400

Once Upon A Diamond

Style of Serge Mouille, ca. 1950s

Estimate: £300–460

Rago Arts

An appeal in support of the Library’s Covid-19 response has raised a total of £208,000. Featuring a record number of donations for an appeal of this kind, it has enabled the Library to meet over 90% of its Covid-19 costs, alleviating much of the direct financial impact of the pandemic and, crucially, limiting the knock-on effect to ongoing efforts to reduce the Library’s operating deficit and ensure its financial sustainability.

pandemic continued and costs increased, The Library Fund appeal launched to support the Library’s direct Covid-19 costs, which, following multiple lockdowns, are estimated to have reached £228,000. Pledges ranged from 300 donations of £50 or less to the largest donation at £15,000, and two matched funding grants totalling £40,000 from The International Friends of The London Library and US Founders’ Circle. •

As ever, if you would like to donate to the Library please visit londonlibrary.co.uk/support-us/make-a-donation or call 020 7766 4795

Liam Roberts

Without title, Alexander Calder

Edwardian arm chair, ca. 1910

Estimate: £430–600

Estimate: £420 - 550

Fixed price: £3,850

Artcurial

The Auction Collective

Wick Antiques

From the outset of the crisis, the Library focused on keeping as many services available as possible. Continuing to operate in accordance with government guidelines required unplanned expense at very short notice, and Library members began donating early on. As the

CREATIVE IMPACT

The London Library generates huge value for the UK economy, according to a new report

Based on research conducted throughout 2020, economic consultancy Nordicity and Saffrey Champness Chartered Accountants published The London Library Impact Report, which revealed that the Library generates an estimated annual value of £21.3 million for the UK economy through the support it provides to members for their IP creation. The £21.3 million economic impact is

equivalent to five times the Library’s annual operating expenditure.

The Impact Report shows that on an annual basis, The London Library’s 7,200+ individual members produce approximately 700 published fiction or non-fiction books, over 15,000 articles and over 430 film scripts, TV screenplays or theatre scripts.

The members who create these works attributed 33% of the creative

Read the full report at LondonLibrary.co.uk/Impact

process to their membership of the Library, benefitting from using the Library’s collection for research and inspiration or using desk space at the Library to write.

Evaluating the economic impact this generates, report authors Nordicity have estimated that 460 full-time jobs within the UK’s creative industries are being supported by the intellectual property creation enabled by the Library. •

Scriptwriter and author John O'Farrell at work in the Library, 2021. Image: Dale Weeks

ANNIVERSARY ADOPTION

In celebration of the Library’s 180th anniversary and to help protect its outstanding collection, the Adopt a Book scheme has been expanded to incorporate books printed in 1841, the year the Library was founded.

Ranging across science, poetry, fiction, biography and folklore, the Library’s collection of books dating from that year includes Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, a copy of George Sand’s feminist novel Lélia and an 1841 edition of Library founder member Harriet Martineau’s abolitionist novel The Hour and the Man – believed to be one of the first books borrowed when the Library opened its doors on 3 May 1841.

Books can be adopted from just £100. Bookplates, which remain for the duration of an adopted book’s lifetime, ensure donors’ names are at the very heart of the Library’s collection. Members and supporters can also adopt a book as a gift, which includes a tour of The London Library building for two. •

To find out more and see a full list of books printed in 1841 visit londonlibrary.co.uk/adopt-1841, or call 020 7766 4795

POSTAL LOANS

The three periods of lockdown since March 2020 amount to one of the longest periods the Library has ever had to close its building – surpassed only by the bombing that closed the Library for six months in 1944.

In addition to expanding its online resources and developing a new eBooks range, the Library has maintained almost continuous access to its collection throughout the pandemic via an enhanced postal loans service, sending books out for free to members. Demand has grown enormously. Since March 2020, the Library has sent out nearly 16,000 books through postal loans. No fewer than 8,000 of those were shipped in the first quarter of 2021.

The service has relied on the onsite postal loans team developing new routines to operate safely within social distancing restrictions. As the Library emerges from lockdown, it is worth reflecting on the special effort they have made, greatly aided by messages of support and encouragement from members. •

Roots to Seeds: 400 Years of Oxford Botany

Celebrates the botanists and collections which have helped to transform our understanding of the biology of plants over the past four centuries.

HB £40.00 | May

A Cornucopia of Fruit & Vegetables: Illustrations from an EighteenthCentury Botanical Treasury

A delicious medley of garden produce and exotics that will capture the imagination of gardeners and art-lovers alike.

HB £15.00 | May

Hyphens & Hashtags: The Stories behind the symbols on our keyboards

Presents the stories behind punctuation marks, mathematical symbols and glyphs, which haunt the edges of our keyboards.

HB £12.99 Mar

Martha Lloyd’s Household Book: The Original Manuscript from Jane Austen’s Kitchen

A fascinating perspective on the time and manner in which both women lived, thanks to this extraordinary artefact passed down through the Austen family.

HB £30.00 Jun

Presented by HilaryKay

Botanical Art Notebook Set – Lemon, Chillis and Apples

This set of three A5, softback notebooks with high quality ruled paper and stitched spines is an exquisite gift for lovers of botanical art, plant-lovers and writers alike.

PB set of 3 £10.99 | May

MAKING SPACE

A move to re-site part of the Library’s Periodicals collection into state-of-the-art offsite storage facilities has enabled the creation of a temporary new reading room, offering 14 desks on the 1st floor area in TS Eliot House overlooking Masons Yard. New secure storage has also been created for the Library’s extraordinary archive onsite, and extra space made available on the shelves for new acquisitions.

For its Periodicals move, the Library is using a converted RAF aircraft hangar in the former air force base at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire. The move reflects the way in which military sites across the UK have increasingly been repurposed as climate-controlled secure sites, providing invaluable space to house national museum and research library collections as they manage space pressure on their own sites.

The 247 rehoused titles include Periodicals in the 8vo section. These have been fully digitised and are available online to members on JSTOR, Biodiversity Heritage Library and Gallica (the Bibliothèque Nationale de France's digital library). To see print originals, members will be able to request volumes through Catalyst for retrieval from the Upper Heyford store. Where JSTOR doesn’t cover recent content, the Library has kept titles onsite to ensure there is no gap in access. Two-thirds of Periodicals 8vo remain onsite and no titles from Periodicals 4to or Folio have been moved.

As the collection continues to grow, with several thousand new books added each year, the Library will actively manage the Stacks to keep creating shelf space, for example reviewing duplicate copies in less well-used subjects for possible relocation to Upper Heyford. •

*Valid for new members in their first year of membership. T&Cs apply, see londonlibrary.co.uk/terms

10% o Library membership for you and your friends

We’re celebrating our 180th birthday and the reopening of the Library building with 10% o membership!

Introduce a friend to the Library and they will get 10% o any membership type and you’ll get 10% o your next renewal*.

Ask them to use code FRIENDS at checkout and mention you on their join form. Valid until 31 May.

londonlibrary.co.uk/join

THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF LONDON

Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BE | www.sal.org.uk/events

ORDINARY MEETING/EVENING LECTURES: All lectures are free, booking is required (5-6pm GMT) All lectures will be live streamed and are open to anyone to join.

Lecture by Dr Simon Kaner FSA & Dr Luke Edington-Brown

Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) archaeology and heritage: changing narratives and current issues

Lecture by Professor Susan Hamilton FSA

Manufactured Bodies:The Impact of Industrialisation on London Health

Lecture by Jelena Bekvalac FSA

Lecture by Professor Martin Millett FSA & Dr Rose Ferraby 29 OCT

Reliquae Isurianae: the antiquarian and contemporary exploration of Roman Aldborough

PICTURE PROJECT

As the Library marks its 180th anniversary and begins to reopen its building to members, the first phase of the Picture Project will shortly be rolled out, bringing a selection of photographic portraits to the newly decorated stairs leading up from the Issue Hall to the Reading Room and St James’s Stacks.

Profiling famous members and highlighting books that have been created here, the Picture Project’s new display will provide a compelling look at the Library’s continuing role as a centre of creativity and inspiration, and celebrates the connections and stories that make this institution special. •

NEW VOICES

Nearly 1,000 applications were received for 40 places on the Library’s third Emerging Writers Programme, which runs from 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2022, with the successful participants due to be confirmed in June.

New Voices Rise, an anthology of original work by participants on the 2019-20 Programme, several of whom have since secured agents or book deals, is also available to read online or download. Limited print editions are also available to purchase from the Library.

The Emerging Writers Programme is free for entry and participation, and offers unpublished writers, in all genres, one year’s free membership of The London Library, writing development masterclasses, literary networking opportunities, peer support and guidance in use of the Library’s resources.

The Programme is funded through donations and also receives backing from the three-year Virago Participation Bursary, supporting Black women and Black writers from other underrepresented genders to overcome financial barriers that would prevent them from accessing the full Programme. •

Read the new anthology at londonlibrary.co.uk/ewp-anthology

www.sal.org.uk/events

(From top) Library member Virginia Woolf photographed by George Charles Beresford in 1902; The London Library’s New Voices Rise anthology. Image: Greg Morrison

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Charles Darwin was one of The London Library’s earliest members, joining within a few weeks of its opening in 1841. Recent research has revealed his voracious appetite for leisure reading

Among The London Library’s archives are handwritten ledgers or “Issue Books” dating from its earliest years, which record the day-to-day traffic of books issued and returned to early members. Never intended to be kept for long, among the handful of Issue Books that survive relate to Charles Darwin and list books that he borrowed during various periods between July 1843 and February 1846, and a few in or around 1852.

These abbreviated (and sometimes illegible) entries have never been formally analysed, but their recent examination by the Library has revealed remarkable insights into Darwin’s reading habits at a hectic period in his life.

During this time he produced works on coral reefs, volcanic islands and a revised edition of his bestselling Voyage of the Beagle. Out of the public eye, he was also working on his species theory, outlining the main ideas in notebooks by 1842 and writing them up as a fully researched paper that he began sharing with his closest friends in 1844, 15 years before they were eventually published.

Domestically, life for Charles and his wife Emma Wedgwood was no less frenetic. The pair already had two young children by the time Charles joined the Library in 1841 and over the next decade, seven more were born, three of them dying young.

Adding to this his frequent bouts of ill health, it is remarkable that Charles had the energy and time for much leisure reading, but the Library’s records reveal that between July 1843 and July 1845 he borrowed at least 200 volumes from The London Library, arranging 36 separate visits to collect them.

They reveal Darwin devouring biographies, history books, travelogues and even the occasional novel. Emma and Charles would often spend evenings reading together and it is highly likely that London Library books formed part of this routine.

Charles’ Issue Books list 119 separate titles, encompassing numerous multi-volume editions. Novels by George Sand; books on constitutional history; histories of the conquest of Mexico; accounts of travels to America, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and South America; sermons by Thomas Arnold and Cardinal Manning; essays by Montaigne and Balzac; guides to country pursuits; a book of nursery rhymes; biographies and correspondence of statesmen. The list is published in full for the first time at londonlibrary.co.uk/darwin.

The Library still has no fewer than 73 of these titles on its shelves dating from the early 1840s. It is quite

“Over two years, Darwin borrowed at least 200 volumes from The London Library”

possible that some of these were in the collection at the time Darwin was borrowing them.

Research in the archive has established that Charles was not the only Darwin to enjoy the Library. His brother Erasmus was a founder member, joining in 1841 and nominating Charles for membership that year. Five of Charles’ children were members: the first-born William joined in 1862 aged 22; astronomer George in 1870; army officer Leonard in 1877; botanist Francis in 1881; Elizabeth in 1890; and his grandson and golf writer Bernard in 1909.

Charles’ great-great granddaughter has continued the tradition: the fiction and short story writer, Emma Darwin, has been a member for the last 19 years. •

(Left) A handwritten record of some of the books that Darwin borrowed from the Library, such as TL Mitchell’s Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, 1841 (right)

COLLECTION STORY

For the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, Andrea Del Cornò from the Library’s Bibliographic Services team finds some historic treasures

Completed a year before his death in 1320, the Divine Comedy by Italy’s national poet, Dante Alighieri, has provided enduring inspiration for western culture, with its vivid and moving portrayals of hell, purgatory and heaven. TS Eliot went so far as to say that it represents “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach”. Among the riches of the Library’s collection are two treasured versions of this great work.

Housed in the miniature books collection is one of the smallest books ever created from handset type, and the smallest version of the Divine Comedy ever issued. Affectionately called the “ Dantino” or “Little Dante”, it was produced in 1878 and is one of only 1,000 ever made. The engraved frontispiece is a portrait of Dante and the colophon states that the edition was completed “a gloria di Dante ” (“to the glory of Dante”). It was printed by the Salmìn brothers of Padua using their minuscule typeface named “carattere a occhio di mosca” or “fly’s eye type”, thought to be the smallest movable type produced. The book took five years to finish and the work is said to have

seriously injured the eyesight of both the compositor and the press-corrector. It measures just 34 x 56mm (the printed area is even smaller) and almost half a million of the fly’s eye types were used to print the 500 tiny pages, with text that is readable only through a magnifying glass.

Described as “the smallest book containing the greatest of all poems”, the Dantino was put on display and admired at the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris as an outstanding example of typographical achievement. A story goes that in 1923, a last remaining copy was presented to the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III. In a letter, the King acknowledged his gratitude but expressed his regret at having misplaced the copy, which remains unaccounted for. The Library counts itself fortunate that its own copy has been retained in safer hands.

Not quite so diminutive is the Library’s first edition of the Aldine Divine Comedy, printed in Venice in 1502, representing the first pocket-sized version of the poem. The Library’s Aldine was handsomely re-bound in the 19th century and a handwritten note reveals that it was sold in

“The Dantino was described as ‘the smallest book containing the greatest of all poems’”

1860 for the sum of six pounds and 15 shillings. It’s worth a great deal more today. The text was edited by humanist – and cardinal to be – Pietro Bembo and became the basis for every subsequent edition of the Divine Comed y until the late 19th century. The 1502 Aldine is well margined and finely impressed, and features the Aldine printer's anchor-and-dolphin device added to the last printed leaf. Not all copies do, suggesting that two impressions of the work were completed, possibly simultaneously.

The Library’s wider Dante collection is impressive and includes books donated by scholar Paget Jackson Toynbee, one of the great English Dantists, and several editions of Dante’s complete works and critical commentaries, both in Italian and English. Written in the Tuscan language rather than Latin, his works became central to the standardisation of the Italian language and the development of Italian literature. It’s little wonder that Italians now celebrate an official national Dante day each March. •

LOOKING

Author and Trustee Yassmin Abdel-Magied on how the Library can inspire young book lovers from diverse backgrounds

FORWARD

Perhaps not many writers can say their university thesis involved designing and building a racing car chassis, or that their first professional experience was as an oil rig drilling engineer. The Sudanese-Australian Yassmin Abdel-Magied is now an essayist and commentator, young person’s author and advocate against the biases that might prevent others from enjoying a career like hers. One of her most recent moves is to become a Trustee of The London Library.

“I've always been somebody who cares a lot about contributing to the spaces that I exist in,” Abdel-Magied says, from Paris, where she is currently on a writer’s residency working on essay collections about resistance and technology. Growing up in Australia – in Queensland and Brisbane – she set up two community-based organisations while she was still a teenager, including Youth Without Borders, which empowers young people of all backgrounds. “I’ve been on boards since I was 16. When I moved to the UK, it was the first time in 12 years that I wasn’t,” she says. Her move came in 2017, and shortly afterwards AbdelMagied joined The London Library, which has been her base since – ideally a desk in the Stacks overlooking St James’s Square – for work on a number of projects, including a large portion of Listen, Layla, the second in her series

of books about a young Sudanese-Australian inventor, in addition to TV scripts and non-fiction projects. She had come across the Library after finding herself in central London, behind on a manuscript deadline and looking for somewhere to work, and “signed up there and then,” she says. “I probably did a bit more wandering around than writing that day.”

Later, while looking for books on Sudan, she stumbled on works written by her aunt Leila Aboulela that document her life as a Sudanese girl in Britain. “I had never read any of her books, but discovered them through The London Library,” says Abdel-Magied. She describes herself as a Library “evangelist” and was drawn to the position of Trustee last year partly due to the open application process. “I thought it was really fantastic because it meant that members like me could apply; it’s a way that you cast the net widely.”

Starting in her role shortly before a global pandemic, she soon found herself having conversations about guiding the Library through “some pretty major changes”. Predominantly, however, her Trusteeship is focused on looking forward, and as part of the Membership and Collections Committees, Abdel-Magied has been “thinking creatively about how we can attract folks from different

“My friends went to the football on the weekend; I went to citizens’ committee meetings”

Yassmin Abdel-Magied speaks in 2017 at a launch event for her autobiography, Yassmin’s Story

backgrounds.” With the Library’s Emerging Writers Programme already in place, as well as inclusion training on offer to the Trustee board, she says she felt confident she was entering an organisation open to new ideas about diversity. “To be honest, having people like me on your Trustee board is part of that,” she says. “Because then somebody can look at the board and think, ‘Oh, I’m reflected in that space.’”

Abdel-Magied is particularly keen to think about how the Library might foster “lifelong relationships” with younger audiences. “The books that changed my life were books that I read when I was a kid,” she says. “You’re still putting the ideas of who you are together.” As well as finding a willing audience for her jokes (“None of my friends think they’re any good”), she relishes the idea of opening young minds to new perspectives with her books. “And also on a very superficial level, it would have been amazing if I had picked up a book at 13 and seen somebody who lived the kind of life that I lived. I was always projecting into the life of a 13-year-old skater boy!”

The daughter of Sudanese immigrants, Abdel-Magied grew up in an environment where her family were in a minority. “I didn’t know any other Black kids growing up,” she says, and this lack of community was jarring for her parents who “came from massive families where being part of a big group and helping each other out was just what you did”. Abdel-Magied’s involvement with community groups and larger institutions such as the Queensland Museum and its Design Council, was in part about a sense of belonging. “Other friends went to the football on the weekend; I went to citizens’ committee meetings at school.”

Growing up as a Muslim woman in Australia, says Abdel-Magied, “it has always been important to me that I’m not limited by who I am”. She graduated Valedictorian with a first-class degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Queensland, having worked as a race car chassis designer for the University racing team. While

“Libraries are transformative –they provide a space for people to explore”

subsequently working as one of the few female engineers for multinational oil and gas companies based in Australia, she also fronted a weekly show on the 24-hour news channel ABC, and co-created productions for television and theatre.

In 2015, her TED talk, “What does my headscarf mean to you?” was chosen as one of the organisation’s “top 10 ideas” that year (it has now been watched over 2.3 million times), and she was named Queensland Young Australian of the Year. After being appointed to the Council for Australian-Arab Relations, she travelled to several Middle Eastern countries to promote Australia. “I have a duty to make the most of what I’ve been given,” she says – a belief driven by her faith. “When I was growing up, my mum would say, ‘One day your God will ask you: I gave you all of these gifts and privileges and blessings, what did you do with them?’ And I always want to have a good answer.”

Abdel-Magied’s father had travelled to study engineering at Imperial College in the late-1970s, and for her living in London had always been a “fantasy”. Following her comments on Australian TV in early 2017 about Sharia law, and a social media post on Anzac Day, which commemorates war casualties of Australia and New Zealand, she was widely attacked in the Australian media. After receiving threats and subsequently changing her phone number and moving house, her relocation to England in 2017 was also a welcome step.

She has always found libraries to be “transformative”, she says. “They provide a space for people to read, explore, learn and be curious.” Talking about The London Library, she is reminded of a “childlike sense of curiosity, but also, as an adult coming across difficult challenges or issues, you’re looking for knowledge that can help you through. And so all of a sudden, it’s not just you by yourself, it’s you and all of the brains of the world in history that can help you through it.”

Ahead of the Library’s 180th Anniversary, Abdel Magied feels that now is a perfect time to take stock, “to think, what do we want to do between now and turning 200 that we can be really proud of?” After a year spent, like much of the world, in relative isolation, she laments the lack of available space for truly communal discourse, asking: “Where do we genuinely have interracial, interreligious, intercultural conversations?” She feels the Library has potential to own this space. “I think people are desperate for genuine discussion that feels like we’re progressing rather than just speaking at each other,” she says. “Life is so much about books and books are so much about ideas and stories, and stories and ideas are not limited to any one type of person.”

Listen, Layla is published in July by Puffin

180 YEARS OF THE LONDON LIBRARY

What does a library mean to a creative mind? Since its founding in 1841, The London Library has provided books, a workplace and inspiration to some of the literary world’s greatest names. From celebrated novelists to debut authors, actors to broadcasters, a host of today’s members pay tribute.

William Boyd

When I moved to London from Oxford in 1983, one of the first decisions I made was to join The London Library. For a good while – over several years – I went there on an almost daily basis, Monday to Friday, and the novels I wrote during those years (Stars and Bars, The New Confessions , Brazzaville Beach, The Blue Afternoon) will always have powerful London Library associations.

For me, its great appeal, apart from the tranquil yet industrious atmosphere of the Reading Room, is the freedom to roam the Stacks. A novelist is a kind of magpie scholar when it comes to researching a book. You have an idea what you are looking for but anything that catches your eye on that journey can find a place in a fiction. The novel is a generous and capacious art form. The aleatory discoveries that I have made in the Stacks of the Library are too numerous to mention but, for me, personal access to those miles and miles of books is what makes The London Library so unusually special.

Inevitably, my visits to the Library are rarer than the old analogue days. But from time to time I find myself back in St James’s Square heading for the Library in search of a particular book, or a journal, or the answer to a question that the internet cannot provide. These visits remind me of my own novel-writing past and the unique function that a library provides in the life of a writer. Every time I cross the threshold I count my blessings that I’m a member of this unique and extraordinary place.

An award-winning writer of 13 novels including A Good Man in Africa and Any Human Heart . Boyd’s latest novel, Trio , is published in paperback in September by Viking

Simon Callow

I have had a lifelong romance with libraries –public, local, university, institutional – but it was not until I encountered The London Library that I really understood what they could be. I was appearing at the National Theatre in 1979, in As You Like It and the original Amadeus, and embarking on the mad project of performing all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets under the direction of Michael Kustow.

Like me a biblio-junkie, Kustow would invariably appear at rehearsals laden with tomes, some marvellously obscure, all stripped of their dust jackets, all bearing that unmistakably bold but plain label, shouting quietly, proclaiming its ownership by THE LONDON LIBRARY. They seemed to me to be the acme of intellectual glamour; I lusted after them. One afternoon a month later, we insanely exposed our work to a packed Olivier auditorium, all 157 Sonnets. John Gielgud was in the third row, Bernard Levin three seats away. As a First Afternoon present, Kustow gave me a year’s membership of the Library. The following day I zipped over to St James’s Square and plunged in.

“Every time I cross the threshold I count my blessings that I’m a member”

Every aspect of the place enchanted me, not least the first sound to reach my ears, the susurrated communications of librarians and members, adepts, it seemed, of some esoteric group, a freemasonry of the written word. And then I remember my first exposure to the Stacks, the Piranesian cage of metal floors and stairs, the calligraphed signs, the nooks and crannies, the sharp click of the lights suddenly illuminating the anonymous looking spines: no frills here, no gaudy dust jackets, just words on the page. The collective aroma was positively aphrodisiac, intoxicating; I had stumbled into a book bordello. But one of a very special kind: pluck a volume from the shelves at random and it might prove to have been added to the collection yesterday, but it might just as likely be centuries old; all of them could be taken home with you.

When I started writing books myself, the innocence of dreamily grazing on the uplands was replaced with the urgent need to track down hard facts. Everything I’ve ever written since has been fed to a greater or a lesser degree by the Library: being able to browse through tourist guides to Morocco from 1930 when I was writing about the 15-yearold Orson Welles’s visit there must stand for all. In these bleak Covidian times the ability to locate a book and then have it sent to one has been a life-saver, but I long, as we all must, to return to those metal floors and inhale that atmosphere, loading myself up with books from three centuries, to pore over them at the carrels and then finally triumphantly swagger out with my stash. Long live The London Library, which constantly evolves, but ever remains its unique self.

The actor, writer and director is currently working on the final volume of his Orson Welles biography

Lianne Dillsworth

When you’re just starting out, it takes courage to call yourself a writer. Yes, all you really need is pen and paper and a love of reading, but from the outside it can feel impenetrable and sometimes, the way we talk about writing, and publishing in particular with all its dos and don’ts, can contribute to that.

When I’ve been struggling to believe in the words I’ve put down on the page, I’ve reached for things outside myself for reassurance. One of those has been my London Library membership card. I think of it as a talisman.

From the first time I sat down to work in the Writers’ Room, I didn’t need to tell myself I was a writer anymore, I could feel it. It was late afternoon and I’d walked down to the Library after work. When I opened the door there were about six people inside, and I tucked myself away at a desk in the corner. But though we were all sitting far apart, hard at work on our individual projects, it felt like we were part of a collective endeavour. And I thought of all the other writers down the years who’d sat there, too. Writers I’d read and loved, writers who’d inspired my own work, and I took comfort from being part of an established tradition of authors who were Library members.

I don’t always say I’m a writer if people ask me what I do, but if I’m ever doubting it I know it’s time to take a trip to 14 St James’s Square.

Age of Monsters , the debut novel by this alumni of the inaugural London Library Emerging Writers Programme, will be published in March 2022 by Windmill. Dillsworth was shortlisted for the 2020 SI Leeds Literary Prize for Black and Asian women writers in the UK

Lianne Dillsworth. Image: Lianne Dillsworth (From left) William Boyd; Simon Callow. Images: Trevor Leighton; Simon Callow

Daisy Dunn

The London Library was described to me before I joined as a place of high ceilings and sprawling Stacks, deep armchairs and carpet slippers, office-less writers and serious readers. In the decade or so I’ve been a member, I have certainly witnessed more than a few moccasins kicked off beneath the shelves while their owners lose themselves in books. It provides a space away from domestic life where we can be ourselves entirely, and I come here to plunge myself into the worlds I like to write about. The fact that I encounter friends every time I visit only enhances the experience. A writer’s life is naturally very isolated. An impromptu cup of tea in the common room is often as good a fuel to my book-writing as it is to my stomach.

Increasingly, I use the Library into the evenings; seeing plays and attending launches, talks, and parties here, and even dropping in to pick up the odd hardback on my way to dinner. When I was interviewed by a newspaper for the publication of one of my books, it was here that I had my picture taken. As a young woman I think it’s important to have a safe London base.

Over the past year I have missed it terribly. While I can’t wait to visit again, I have benefitted from the postal loans service, which has enabled me to borrow liberally from the Classics and Biography sections. I sit and picture all those books just waiting to be taken out.

A classicist, art historian and critic, Daisy Dunn’s books include In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny and Of Gods and Men: 100 Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome

Amber Medland

Before the pandemic, I spent more time in The London Library than anywhere else. When I joined, the Library was the only place I could concentrate and the only place where I felt like a writer first, and a friend/flatmate/daughter/ part-time PA second, and it remains crucial to my writing life. I’ve measured out the lockdowns in postal loans. While I was writing my debut novel, Wild Pets, I spent two full days a week in either the Reading Room or the Stacks, praying to stumble across books that would help my work. (Such collisions are by no means unusual). I sent the librarians elaborate research questions and they sent me reading lists. My favourite mornings were Saturdays, when there were only one or two other people there, and a kind of wry solidarity between us. The Library gives me creative freedom. The Supported Membership makes it affordable, and I come stocked with snacks and my water bottle. There aren’t many places in London where you can work for eight hours straight without spending anything. Even when I really don’t want to work, I know that if I can get myself to the Library, I will leave feeling enriched.

Among the inaugural London Library Emerging Writers, Medland’s first novel, Wild Pets, is published in July by Faber & Faber

“The Library gives me creative freedom... it remains crucial to my writing life”

(From left) Daisy Dunn; Amber Medland. Images: Alice Dunn; The London Library

Oliver Kamm

I’ve been a member of The London Library for the best part of 20 years. It’s been not only an invaluable resource but has become a central part of my life and work. As a journalist, I write opinions rather than news, and my output depends on the stuff I know: the details of policy, the sweep of history, and the apt analogy or literary reference. The Library enables me to find out new things and excavate from the back of my mind what needs to be at the forefront of it. I can’t claim to have mastered its filing system but this is part of the Library’s value as well as its charm: I will always find something that I wasn’t looking for, and that will take me further into a subject. One aspect of its coverage that is irreplaceable but not much remarked upon is that it’s part of social history itself; its mission and range of titles reflect the ethos and enthusiasms of our forebears. It is an oasis of learning and recreation, and has remained so even in these dark times of isolation.

A leader writer and columnist for The Times , Oliver Kamm’s latest book is Mending the Mind: The Art and Science of Overcoming Clinical Depression, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Joshua Levine

Over lockdown I began running through central London in the evenings. I’m not fit but I can run slowly in a straight line – and the centre of town was stunning and empty. It will never feel the same again. I began running past my favourite places – only working out what they were as I went. And my final stop, most nights, turned out to be The London Library.

Clearly I was missing it. I’ve been a member since I started making a living as a writer, and I’ve always got more work done there than anywhere else. I was missing all those books I couldn’t find anywhere else – the Library is a gentler, deeper internet. (There’s a thrill in borrowing a book that hasn’t been touched since 1955.) I was missing other members, those lovely, awkward people whose names I’ve never quite learned. I was missing the staff – always helpful and friendly in the face of unreasonable requests. And I was missing the atmosphere.

As I write, lockdown seems to be heading towards some sort of conclusion. Soon I won’t need to run past the Library. I’ll be back inside, probably in my favourite seat by the window on Level Five. But if I look complacent (as I often do) feel free to remind me what the place meant to me when its doors were shut.

Joshua Levine is a historian, broadcaster and writer of, most recently, Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture

“The Library is part of social history; it reflects the ethos and enthusiasms of our forebears”

“If I loved The London Library before lockdown, I think I love it with even greater fervour since… There is nowhere else like it”

Suzannah Lipscomb

To spend a day at The London Library, in normal times, is a glorious relief from the rest of life: a day spent wallowing in reading and quiet companionable concentration, rummaging through the Stacks, or finding a moment of thought pierced by a sudden rush of wonder at the beauty of some architectural feature. It’s to encounter serendipities: chancing upon an unexpected friend or finding just the right book. It’s the privilege of being in the very places where august authors have written brilliantly. Above all, it’s the opportunity to rifle through a collection of thousands of books on almost every conceivable subject. To spend a day at The London Library, to borrow a phrase from Kenneth Clark, is to step into a clearing in the jungle and be renewed by a glimpse of the sky.

But if I loved The London Library before lockdown, I think I love it with even greater fervour since. Who else will send by post a bloated 1907 edition of Spanish letters from an ambassador to Henry VII’s court, a slim memoir about queer mothering, and the complete correspondence of a Tudor queen? In this time when most archives have been impossible to access, these care-packages and the Library’s access to online journals and e-books have kept my writing life alive. I thank God for The London Library; there is nowhere else like it.

The award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster is Professor of History at the University of Roehampton, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a History Today columnist

Suzannah Lipscomb. Image: Suzannah Lipscomb

(From left) Oliver Kamm, Joshua Levine. Images: The Times; Cammie Toloui

“I have written half a dozen novels at favourite seats way up in the Stacks”

Andrew Lycett

The London Library is an oasis of intelligence and light that makes visiting the howling West End tolerable and worthwhile. I love the way that I bump into people there who I’d otherwise not see. You can’t speak long, so there’s no danger of conversations becoming boring. Such encounters are a fillip to any day (and much missed during lockdown).

The fabric of the place adds to the experience. This exudes a delightful atmosphere of freedom, satisfaction and calm, which is enhanced by the graciousness of the staff. Remarkably, I’ve never witnessed any form of altercation anywhere in the building. This is linked to the way that members are treated like adults. It starts with being able to rummage in the Stacks and find books you might never have thought of. It extends to being trusted to check out anything you want to borrow (and not just slip it into your bag). And it is reflected in the policy of being allowed to keep volumes out, at least until someone else requests them.

That last benefit is particularly valuable for a biographer. I can pore over a book in my own time, and in my own environment. If I’m working on someone’s life, I can retain diaries or related reminiscences by my side and refer to them when required.

The author, critic and broadcaster is best known for his biographies of Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling and Wilkie Collins among others

John O’Farrell

I clearly remember my first visit to The London Library. I was about 12 years old and came in with my father who had some books to return. As we were leaving, an elderly man shuffled past whom my father immediately recognised. “Lord Snow!” he blurted out. The slightly alarmed C.P. Snow said “Yes?” and my dad said “May I introduce my son?” And inside I was thinking “Dad, why on Earth are you doing this to us both? I am 12 years old, it is very unlikely that the two of us are going to have a great deal in common.”

I never imagined that many decades later, I would be regularly spotting great authors in that lobby, some of whom I had come to know, and many more that I wished I did. But now I feel part of a community of writers who work and research at The London Library, and I think we all find encouragement or take solace in sharing our creative frustrations. (The collective noun is “a whinge of writers”.)

I have written half a dozen novels at favourite seats way up in the Stacks, I have researched non-fiction books browsing the miles of shelves, and now that I do a history podcast (We Are History with the comedian Angela Barnes) there is no greater thrill than to pick out the perfect book with which to research that week’s subject. My old mate C.P. Snow (“ahem”) enlightened us on politicians in The Corridors of Power, but like him I was to learn that the greatest place for a writer to be is a mile down the road, wandering through the Corridors of Culture. •

The author, scriptwriter and political campaigner has worked as a lead writer for programmes including Spitting Image and Have I Got News for You and co-hosts the We Are History podcast

(From left) The back Stacks at The London Library; Andrew Lycett; John O’Farrell. Images: The London Library; Andrew Lycett; Tim Golfe

CASE

REOPENED

Author Lucy Jago explores an infamous Jacobean crime from a brand new perspective – that of the women convicted of murder

Lucy Jago was in The London Library when she read two lines in a book about Frances Howard and Anne Turner, two convicted murderers from the Jacobean court of James I. This was during research for her previous book, Montacute House , a young adult novel set in the Elizabethan era. “I thought, ‘That’s absolutely fascinating,’” Jago says, from her home in Somerset. “I found it so interesting to find women who had some sort of agency.”

Frances was a countess, Anne a physician’s widow, and in 1615 they stood accused of the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, who opposed Frances’ marriage to his friend, Robert Carr – a “favourite” and a bedfellow of the King. Ten years after the encounter in The London Library, Jago has published a novel based on the scandal called A Net for Small Fishes, her debut for adults. Although these events have been re-told before, it has never been from the perspective of Turner and her friendship with Howard.

Their early 17th-century world would have often had women stripped of all independent thought and action, as does the historical record. Original trial documents exist, but these were events at which women were not allowed to speak. “Contemporary accounts just dismiss [Anne and Frances] as vain and lustful and that seems to be enough,” says Jago. “I felt I wanted to give them a voice, a chance to tell their own story, maybe to justify themselves. But really, I wanted to give them complex motivation; to understand why they did actually do something that would have risked everything. I wanted to resurrect them from the dead, a bit like a necromancer.”

Sorcery does feature in A Net for Small Fishes, sought out by Anne and Frances to remedy the problems in their love lives, on which their futures rested, and in keeping with the belief systems of the time. To illuminate these aspects of their lives with a scarcity of source material, Jago says she “had to go sideways. You have to find, what was London? What were the horizons of possibility that these women had?”

Judicious browsing led her to valuable discoveries on, for instance, the first ever shopping centres in London, among the few public spaces women were allowed unaccompanied. “Then when I wanted my characters moving around the city, I knew what they could and couldn’t do and might have thought or believed in. And that’s from going up into the Stacks in The London Library and finding the books next to the books I was looking for.”

“I wanted to give these women a voice, a chance to tell their own story, maybe to justify themselves”

A portrait of Frances Howard, countess of Somerset by William Larkin,

Anne Turner,

“We’re so interested in history at the moment because we feel these are historic times”

Alongside her reading, “I do love finding anything material,” Jago says. “When I went to [the 17th-century] Ham House, the smells, the noises, everything about that helps inform your writing; going to the V&A, they have an embroidered day jacket that a woman would have worn at the time [of James I]. It is like archaeology. You have to dig and dig and dig to find stuff. But then when you do, it’s those little nuggets that really set your writing on fire.”

The real challenge, she says, was handling the structure of the new novel, “because I’m a stickler for historical accuracy.” While Montacute House was pure fiction, only one character in A Net for Small Fishes is an invention. “In a way I find [this] more interesting,” says Jago. “Maybe Hilary Mantel feels the same. When you have real historical characters you’re fleshing out, the fact they did actually live and breathe, the responsibility one feels to put voices into the mouths of people who actually existed – I found that so exciting.”

Mantel, along with Rose Tremain and Andrew Miller “were like ghostly figures around me in the Library,” she says, keeping her going when she struggled. To Mantel, however, she feels “personally grateful because she’s done so much for historical fiction, in changing people's rather bodice-ripper attitude towards it… she’s given it a respectability, people are interested in it, both in literary and intellectual terms. And I think she’s done that almost single-handedly.”

Jago’s first step as a writer came after 12 years as a director-producer in TV documentaries. “I did write a lot as a child and won poetry prizes and essay competitions and things, but it never dawned on me I could actually do this as a career,” she says. “I don’t know why. I thought, I’ll go into telly. That’s quite similar. It’s arty, and it’s interesting and I’ll enjoy it. And I did.” An early project followed a 14th-century pilgrimage route from Ulm in Germany down to the Sinai Peninsula (“total heaven”) and she drew on her BA in archaeology and anthropology across arts, travel and history programmes. By the mid-2000s, large productions were increasingly scarce and “I did face quite

a lot of misogyny from my all-male crews quite often... I was quite happy to leave and just write full-time.”

Her first book was a biography of the scientist Kristian Birkeland, who theorised the electric atmospheric currents behind the aurora borealis, though received little recognition in his lifetime. Montacute House told a story driven by an unlikely heroine – a “poultry girl” in a noble house foils an evil plot against a royal – and it saw Jago “dipping a toe in the water of fiction”.

Across all her book projects, she has found in The London Library a “haven”. “Because when you work at home, especially once you have children, people often assume it's OK to interrupt you. By going to the Library, I was signalling: I’m at work.” Having now moved to Somerset and less able to visit the Library and work there she has nonetheless rejoined as she “missed it so much”. “There is nothing like The London Library anywhere else in the world that I’ve ever found.”

Jago’s new book has featured in a number of “best of” lists this year and has been, it is safe to say, a lockdown hit. The author agrees that it appears to have hit a nerve, and one “that’s been jangling for a decade. As I was writing, though it had started before, #MeToo really took off and I think women’s voices, and the unrepresented voices of the world, are beginning to feel they have a right to speak their truth.”

Recent events may also have played a role in its appreciation. While widespread, life-threatening disease was common even a hundred years ago, “this is the first time we in the West have felt our lives properly in the balance,” Jago says. “Maybe we’re so interested in history at the moment because we feel these are historic times; in America, the threat to democracy, the threat to people’s rights… We can see that so much of what we’ve won, we might be losing.”

Breathing life into unheard voices from the past only serves to bring that point home. •

A Net for Small Fishes is published by Bloomsbury

THE MODERN WORLD

Alexandra Pringle remembers the early years of Virago’s Modern Classics – a series that gave women writers a vital new platform

It was in 1978 that Alexandra Pringle first walked into the Virago offices in Wardour Street, Soho, in a building set between “pinball arcades and sex shops”. She was there for an interview, and arrived excited at the prospect of joining the publishing house that, in the space of five years, had already made waves bringing the work of overlooked women writers such as Rebecca West and Antonia White to the fore. Climbing five flights of stairs, she reached a tiny room at the top of the building, and there sat Carmen Callil, Virago’s tenacious co-founder. “Carmen interviewed me and wanted to know what I was reading,” Pringle says. “I pulled out Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding – and she looked at it and said, ‘Oh, that could be a Modern Classic.’”

And so began Pringle’s 12-year tenure at Virago, “the first mass-market publisher for 52 per cent of the population – women”, as it declared when it was founded in 1973. During her time there she would help guide its Modern Classic series to becoming the iconic and groundbreaking brand that it is today. These books, with their instantly recognisable green spines, striking art-filled covers and carefully commissioned introductions, were at the heart of the organisation’s work, providing reprints of novels too long relegated to the sidelines of history. For Pringle, they provided an avenue into unexplored territory both literary and literal – The London Library became a home away from home for her research – and a continuation of interests that had dominated her life from an early age.

Alexandra Pringle. Image: Greg Morrison

Pringle grew up surrounded by two things integral to the Virago world – politics and books. Both of her parents were “committed socialists”, she says, and her father would “tell me the history of the Labour Party while he gave me my bath”. He was also an English teacher, and had Pringle reading Jane Austen by the time she was 11. Her mother, a Jewish Berber from Morocco, was even more influential: handing her daughter books she would later publish in the Virago Modern Classics. “She gave me Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann when I was about 12 or 13 and said ‘This book changed my life’,” Pringle explains. “She never called herself a feminist, but my God, she was one.”

Literature came to dominate Pringle’s everyday life, often at the cost of her studies. “I really just read novels all the time and didn't work at school,” she says. At Cambridge Tech (now Anglia Ruskin University), Pringle became involved in the first Cambridge Poetry Festival. “The Black Mountain Poets were there, Creeley and Duncan, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney. We’d hang out in the bars and I just thought, this is the life I want.”

The journey from here to Virago is one, fittingly, straight out of a book – a stint teaching English in Florence, time spent in a room in Whitechapel with “a rat up the chimney”, and many days spent in the Plough on Museum Street, meeting artists as part of her first job in publishing with Art Monthly (“I got married for the first of three times to an artist who, of course, didn't have any money”). It was after she decided she needed a larger income that Art Monthly ’s editor, the “wonderful, incredibly glamorous” Peter Townsend, mentioned that his next-door neighbour, Ursula Owen, had started a company called Virago Press with two other people. Soon followed the journey to Wardour Street and that long climb up to the fourth floor.

Pringle began at Virago working three days a week –the other two spent at Art Monthly. By the time she arrived, Modern Classics such as Antonia White’s A Frost in May had been published, and Virago was attracting criticism in a way only a truly successful game-changing organisation could. “Anthony Burgess called us chauvinist sows... It was wonderful – the more people got angry with us the better it was, really.” For Pringle, a move to somewhere with such a strong political mission felt like a “natural evolution, rather than a revolution”, and she had no doubt as to the importance of what she and her colleagues were doing. “It was like being on the front line of a battle; we really felt that we were going to change the world. And I think we

“We literally could not have done that series without The London Library”

did. We were going to change the culture. It was thrilling but it was also terrifying, because we had to make it work.” And make it work they did. Pringle quickly became an integral part of the four-person team, finding in Ursula – “the intellectual of Virago, who is still one of my dearest friends in the world” – and Callil “two mothers in a way”. She makes no secret of the fact that Callil was “very frightening” and “a bully” – scoring through her work on many occasions – but is also quick to explain that she “learned so much from her”. “Everything that I do, the way that I publish is so affected by Carmen,” she says. “She taught me how to write cover copy, how to take books out into the world, and she also taught me how important the package of the book is, how it needs to look fabulous.”

Indeed, it was with Callil that Pringle worked exclusively for years on the Classics, an immense project that saw her getting to know writers such as Barbara Comyns and Attia Hosain, and visiting the Courtauld and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition to research the jackets. For the books themselves, however, there was only one place to go: The London Library. “It was the absolute bedrock; we literally could not have done that series without The London Library, because in those days it was extremely difficult to get hold of second-hand copies of books,” she says. “I had lists of authors, Elizabeth Taylor, for example, and I'd find as many books as I could and scoop them up.”

The Library offered something else, too: a vital means of escape. “I was only allowed out of the office to take books

(Left and right) Early Virago Modern Classics editions with their recognisable green cover designs

to the post or to go to The London Library, so you could imagine my joy of going into that beautiful building where I'd get electric shocks from the metal frames in the Stacks. It was the happiest moment of my week when I could sneak off there.” The grand old building on St James’s Square also became one of several literary institutions “offering a huge amount of cheering on” for what Virago was doing. “We didn't have the money to create new editions – quite often we went there and asked if we could unbind and then rebind one of their copies and they let us do it, which is incredible. In a way we were creating our own library, and it was with the help of The London Library that we could.”

Pringle left Virago in 1990, first to take over at Hamish Hamilton as editorial director, before later becoming a literary agent and then, in 1999, joining Bloomsbury

as editor-in-chief, where she remains. Since her career began, she notes that the industry has seen a shift “because publishing is full of women”, but that “if you look at the top, they are men on the whole. And that is where the change has to be.”

And yet while there are still battles to be won, Pringle is clear on the transformative effect that Virago and its Modern Classics has had the world round. “We gave so much joy to so many women. And I find even now I'll meet people who are younger than me, who were children, who say that Virago changed their lives, and it's incredibly moving.” Under Virago, a classic became “something that we felt was worth reading, worth continuing with, that it deserved a new life,” she says, adding: "We had a mission. But it was also such fun.” •

For

Broadway glamour and toe-tapping tunes in an all-Gershwin extravaganza

Rhapsody in Blue with pianist Viv McLean

‘S Wonderful • Strike Up the Band • Fascinatin’ Rhythm

Oh, Lady Be Good! • Summertime and more

London Concert Orchestra Richard Balcombe conductor

Katie Birtill & Rodney Earl Clarke guest singers plus a sensational ballroom duo

0203

THE LONDON LIBRARY LIT FEST

Join Sarah Waters, Tom Stoppard and others to mark the Library’s 180th birthday, as it presents three days of online talks, performances and workshops. Ticket holders can watch events live or any time until 13 June

1 MAY

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales Workshop

Join graphic novelist Karrie Fransman and digital wizard Jonathan Plackett for a creative workshop of literary discovery, as they delve deep into The London Library’s collection using their gender-swapping computer algorithm to shed light on the stories we tell. Suitable for anyone aged 8–108.

12–1pm

Sarah Waters: In Conversation

Sarah Waters talks to Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five, about the inspiration, motivation and discoveries that have informed her award-winning novels – all modern classics, beautifully and vividly told, which reveal the hidden histories of women’s lives and LGBTQ+ culture.

2–3pm

Buried Treasure

Hannah Chukwu, editor of Bernardine Evaristo’s Black Britain: Writing Back series, and Lennie Goodings, Chair of Virago Books, speak to writer and broadcaster Bidisha about the political nature of publishing and bringing forgotten works to new generations.

4–5pm

Rebecca West: A Celebration

As English PEN and The London Library mark our anniversaries, we celebrate the incredible life of Rebecca West, author, journalist, literary critic, travel writer, fearless intellectual and one of the most energetic and fierce figures in our organisations’ histories.

6–7pm

A Room of One’s Own (performance)

Marking the 80th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death, we premiere our dramatisation of her iconic 1928 feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own, adapted by Linda Marshall Griffiths, directed by Charlotte Westenra, filmed in The London Library and featuring Nina Sosanya, Colin Tierney and Sophie Melville.

8–9pm

2 MAY

Around the World in 10 Books

Join writers Judith Robinson and Scott Pack as they travel the globe in search of great, but largely unsung, works of world literature. This will be a celebration of the power of the written word, no matter what the original language, and explore why every good library needs to represent literature from around the globe.

12–1pm

Salman Rushdie: In Conversation

Salman Rushdie joins English PEN and The London Library to celebrate 40 years since the publication of his trailblazing novel, Midnight’s Children. He’ll discuss the inspiration and genesis of his magical realist classic, his remarkable body of work since, literature and freedom of expression.

2–3pm

Zweig in London

Exiled by the Nazis from his native Vienna at the height of his glittering literary career, Stefan Zweig found refuge in London and The London Library. Philippe Sands, George Prochnik and Daria Santini discuss Zweig’s time in London, woven through with readings of his letters.

4–5pm

After Vienna: Edmund de Waal and Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard and Edmund de Waal discuss the themes and concerns they share in their work, including diaspora, displacement, art and libraries and the cultural particularity of pre-war Vienna.

6–7pm

5x15: Science and Miscellaneous

In partnership with 5x15, historian Suzannah Lipscomb, novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls, novelist Naomi Ishiguro and writer and engineer Yassmin Abdel-Magied share stories inspired by The London Library’s gloriously eccentric Science & Miscellaneous section.

8–9.15pm

3 MAY

The London Library Emerging Writers Showcase

We showcase the exceptional talent to come out of the inaugural London Library Emerging Writers Programme with members of the cohort reading from the anthology of the work they produced throughout their year with the Library.

12–1pm

Global Conversations: Myth and Discovery

We bring Monique Roffey (UK) and C Pam Zhang (USA) together across two continents to discuss the common themes of myth, discovery and the lure and lore of the frontier. In partnership with Brighton Festival.

2–3pm

Friendships & Rivalries with Simon Schama

Historian Simon Schama discusses some of the most famous and fascinating friendships and rivalries to have been forged among writers throughout history: from Boccaccio and Petrarch to Montaigne and La Boétie and plenty others since.

4–5pm

A Theatre for Dreamers with Polly Samson

Novelist Polly Samson speaks to Edward Docx about her spellbinding new novel set among the artists, writers and musicians of 1960s Hydra. Alongside music from David and Romany Gilmour, they discuss utopian dreams and the explosive potential of artistic communities.

6–7pm

Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Malika’s Poetry Kitchen

Celebrating 20 years of pioneering poetry collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, we close out the festival with a party of poetry featuring Malika Booker, Inua Ellams, Kayo Chingonyi, Zakia Carpenter-Hall, Arji Manuelpillai and Charlotte Ansell. Hosted by MPK Director Jill Abram.

8–9.15pm

Tickets on sale until 13 June –visit londonlibrarylitfest.co.uk. For information on further events this season, check londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on and fortnightly newsletters

(From left) Sarah Waters; Salman Rushdie. Images: Charlie Hopkinson; Rachel Eliza Griffiths

(From left) Tom Stoppard; C Pam Zhang; Malika Booker. Images: The London Library; Gioia Zloczower; Malika’s Poetry Kitchen

MEET A MEMBER

Melanie Backe-Hansen uncovers the past, house by house

My first job after moving to England from Australia was in Covent Garden, and I was always looking up at buildings thinking, “What was this like 200 years ago?” I had studied modern British history and was working in publishing when a role came up with an estate agent to research the history of houses as a marketing tool, and that’s how I got my first step into house history.

I’ve worked as a research consultant on the television show A House Through Time since the beginning, which is a privilege because they do an enormous amount of work. There is a rise in interest about personal histories that go beyond the kings and queens and famous battles, and A House Through Time has contributed to that. Every time it comes out, social media goes wild. I’ve spoken to so many production companies over the years and they never got the format right, combining history and properties, so it was great that they finally nailed it.

My specialism is social history – a domestic house is a great microcosm of past lives. Nine years ago, I was writing my second book and getting asked to do so many private commissions that I decided to go freelance, and I now research houses across the country for homeowners

or corporate clients. I’m looking at one in Essex now that is jam-packed with stories: from a potential priest hole to what could be “witches’ marks” – made on entries or exits to protect against evil – and 19th-century stories of a murder. I’ve found glimpses of the 1500s, but it’s been a challenge because early records sometimes just list “the house”, with no further details.

Many key sources are local estate or manorial records, but The London Library has so much that I rely on. From historic newspapers to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Burke’s genealogy, Who’s Who, the architecture, history, topography and heraldry sections. I once researched the former house of the head of MI6, so I ended up in Spies. I also found in Biographies a wonderful collection of letters between Thomas Jefferson and the former occupant of another house. It’s a treat to be a member and even in lockdown I’m using it pretty much every day. •

Melanie has written three books, including A House Through Time with David Olusoga

Melanie Backe-Hansen