HIDDEN CORNERS
Back stack adventures
Jeremy Treglown revisits the Library’s T. Spain section, finds it all too easy to get sidetracked both literally and metaphorically, and encounters early signs of British xenophobia You just go to the shelves. Well, first you go up a few steps into History – these are the Back Stacks and it’s basically still the ground floor but it’s marked ‘Level Three’ . Turn sharp right twice, down two vertiginously perforated iron staircases to Level One, Topography. The regions are organised alphabetically, so Spain is – no, not in ‘Russia → Zululand’ , as it happens – you go a bit further to the right, then left past Arctic, Australia and British Columbia, up a couple of steps and you’ll see Scotland, Serbia & Jugoslavia ahead: there you are. Um, I may have, ah … no, that aisle’s blocked by a lift, so we go back, then around – I’ll just switch on these lights – New Guinea, Palestine & Syria, try right once more to the back of the lift. And immediately left, Sierra Leone, and here we are in Spain. Warm? Yes, me too. Even by The London Library’s own standards its Spanish holdings are quirky and sprawling. Topography alone houses 27 military-style metal shelves full of Hispanic material, each shelf carrying about 30 books, among them relevant elements of a collection given to the Library by Joseph Conrad’s contemporary and friend, the part-Spanish Scottish-nationalist Harrovian socialist politician and adventurer R.B. (‘Don Roberto’) Cunninghame Graham, aka ‘the Gaucho Laird’ , in memory of his young wife Gabrielle. Alphabetically by author, the books start with John Leycester Adolphus’s Letters from Spain, published by John Murray at Albemarle Street in 1858, and end with La Itálica (1886) by Fernando de Zevallos, a priest at the monastery of San Isidoro del Campo, Seville. ‘La Itálica’ was the name of the ancient Roman colony
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now better known as Old Seville, and Fr. Fernando’s book represents just one of travel writing’s multitudinous forms: an account of a journey not geographical – the medieval monastery is next door to, indeed on top of, some of the Roman remains – but in time. ‘I thought I could hear the noise of a vast crowd sitting on these steps, ’ Fernando wrote of the amphitheatre, ‘and could see the grandest aristocracy the world has ever known, knights and venerable magistrates of the Roman Empire thronging the rostrum which today is level with the ploughed fields’ . But I mean to focus on Anglophone travellers on the peninsula so must ignore books in Spanish (and also, here, French, German and Italian), hard though that can be, particularly when they impose themselves physically: the seven decadently white-green-andgold-bound volumes of P. Gabriel de Henao’s Averiguaciones [Findings] de las antigüedades de Cantabria (1894–5), for example, the Library’s copy of which is flamboyantly dedicated by the author to the pretender ‘King’ Carlos VII: ‘receive this little tribute as proof of the love and unshakable loyalty offered you by your loyal vassal. ’ Nor must I get distracted by associations (I’m not the only Library member to have been lunched on a nearSpanish scale in Albemarle Street by the sixth John Murray). With these restrictions in mind it’s just a matter, as I said, of going to the shelves and starting at the beginning. But what beginning? Alphabetically, the first relevant work after Adolphus’s (‘The only apology which the author can seriously make, ’ Adolphus writes, ‘for
