Behind the Stacks at the London Library

'The true university of these days is a collection of books.’ So wrote Thomas Carlyle in Heroes and Hero-Worship, and there can be few more remarkable book collections than that held at the London Library, the institution founded at Carlyle’s instigation in 1841. Now the largest independent lending library in the world, the London Library is a resilient product of early-Victorian philanthropy that reassuringly maintains its belief in the continued value of the printed word. For over a century and a half it has been serving generations of writers, researchers and readers throughout the country by offer­ing them something of the riches of a national reference library for use in their own homes and workplaces.

It is a rare and long-held tenet of the Library that as books are never entirely super­seded, and therefore never redundant, its collec­tions should not be weeded of material merely because it is old, idiosyncratic or unfashionable.