Celebrating 180 years of The London Library - 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.