Celebrating 180 years of The London Library - 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 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