[The following originally featured in Structo seven, which you can find more about on our main site. It contains linked footnotes.]

This new feature is all about fascinating ‘book spaces’ – libraries and bookshops – viewed through the eyes of the people who work there. What’s so special about these stacks of books? What keeps them there? And is Amazon going to ruin everything?    

When pondering the shortlist for our first subject, there were some fairly obvious choices: the British Library for one, the legendary Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, the Bodleian in Oxford… And yet, while they are all interesting – and hopefully we’ll get a chance to have a poke around them at some point in the not-too-distant future – there is one which has a bit more of an air of mystery about it. One which not too many people have even heard of – The London Library.    

Even if you regularly pass its St James’s Square home, it would be quite easy to miss The London Library altogether. It’s hidden behind an unassuming façade in the corner of the square, and it is only once you enter that the sheer scale of the place becomes clear. The Library was founded in 1841 by the great intellectuals of the time, and over the intervening decades it has evolved into the world’s largest independent lending library. It now contains over a million books on sixteen miles of shelving.¹

Inez Lynn is the tenth Librarian of The London Library, the first female Librarian in its 170 year history. As such she is also chief executive of the large charitable organisation that keeps it all going.    

I sat down with Lynn and the library’s Communications and Public Affairs Manager Aimée Heuzenroeder to talk about the philosophy behind the collections, why the Library is such a draw for authors, and of course about ‘Death, Dentistry, Devils & Demonology’. 

How did you initially find out about the Library? 

Lynn: I was looking for an interesting first professional post,² and saw this one advertised. And I have to confess, that like many people at that stage, I had not heard of The London Library. It was only when I came for an interview and saw the scale of the collections that I thought, yes, this is a place I would like to work. And the longer you engage with the collections here, the more fascinating they become, because they’re so widespread and yet so astonishing.

Do you have a feel for the entire catalogue?

Lynn: I have a sense of it, and also because – and I think this is one of the things that makes us different – you would be hard-put to find many libraries on this scale where the librarian is directly involved in the selection of books for the collection. So in that sense yes I do have a feel for the collection, where our strengths are, what we’re still collecting. And I’m constantly reading book reviews and publishers’ catalogues, selecting books to add to it. So yes I do have a good feel, but it takes a few years to build up that knowledge, and that’s one of the reasons why it gets under people’s skin. It’s not unusual for our staff to have been here for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, or even forty years; and then you really do get to know the collections.

I suppose the fact that you’re the tenth Librarian here and the Library has been going for 170 years rather illustrates that! [Laughter]

Lynn: Absolutely. Although Hagberg Wright, who I still think of as the great Librarian, from 1893– 1940 – he died in-post – might account for a lot of those years!

I first heard about The London Library through Ian McEwan. One of his characters in Enduring Love spends the morning doing some research in The London Library. Do you know how featured you are in fiction? 

Lynn: We know we’re featured heavily in fiction, but not the full extent of it. James Bond is sent here in one of the novels, Sherlock Holmes sends Dr Watson here, Aldous Huxley writes about the Library in his novels. There have been several crime novels set in the Library, with murder by crushing in rolling stacks, as was used in the plot of [BBC TV drama series] New Tricks recently. We turn up all over the place, and I collect them whenever I come across the reference. I have a little file on The London Library in literature. One of these days an article is going to come out.

Heuzenroeder: … and then people’s letters of course. If you read Virginia Woolf’s letters for example, she ‘did this, walked down the street and bought this, then went to The London Library’.

Just how do you choose what kind of books to buy in for the collections?

Lynn: It’s a case of building on the accidents of history. If you go right back to the beginning when the Library was founded, and the people who did found it: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Dickens, Thackeray, Gladstone…³ In many ways they were creating a collection to meet their own reading needs. So if you’ve got John Stuart Mill choosing your political economy and philosophy, you can imagine that you’re going to have real strength and depth there, and so successive Librarians have continued growing on that. There were two early Librarians who were passionate about Russia, and had excellent contacts – Hagberg Wright was a personal friend of Tostoy – so we have got a very strong Russian collection, and you carry on building on the strengths that you’ve got.

Heuzenroeder: We’re also very responsive to members’ needs; our members are always suggesting books to add to the collections, and by and large they don’t make silly suggestions. They might be working in a particular section of the collection they know very well and see that there’s something needed. We add 8,000 books to the collections each year,⁴ but they’re not necessarily newly published books, they’re a mix of new titles and ones which we can see that there’s a gap in the collections for. We’re constantly responding to what the members want and how they use the collections as well. It makes the growth both organic and coherent I think, because by and large members wouldn’t suggest a book they didn’t want or a book which would seem oddly out of context.

Lynn: We’re also always trying to find the books that are of lasting value, because one of our principles is that we don’t throw books out. We try to avoid acquiring things in the first place which are not going to last the test of time.

That must be a difficult job…

Lynn: It is a difficult job, because the latest bestseller is not necessarily what people are going to be interested in in ten or fifteen years’ time. We have an inner core where we’re looking at different aspects of life really: culture, life and thought. Everything from history and people and places and social culture, philosophy, social science, and then the arts and performing arts side of things. At the heart it’s European and Western – because that was the world view in the nineteenth century when we were founded – and then with moving out we have less depth, but will still collect in all those areas, moving out first of all into Western European, American, Commonwealth, then the rest of the world. Then there’s the periphery which has something about the whole of the world, and every aspect of knowledge, so if a book comes out on the history of Tupperware we have to have it! Somebody somewhere will want to know that. We’re not going to have lots of them, but it’s an idea.  So that would go into Science & Miscellaneous?

Lynn: Yes that would probably go into Science & Miscellaneous.⁵ [Laughter]

Which I loved the idea of. What was it now? ‘Death, Dentistry,
Devils & Demonology (See also: R. Hell)’?⁶ [Laughter]

Heuzenroeder: We like to remind our members of their mortality. [More laughter]

Speaking of the members, are there many different kinds of member? 

Heuzenroeder: There’s a wonderful community of day-to-day members, and then there are people who will come in and they’ll work in briefer bursts, or will come in simply to collect books rather than to work in the building. There are different communities of members but they all meld together very nicely.

Lynn: There’s a whole community, for example, who never come here at all, and do everything by post. They can’t get here, whether because they’re far away or because they’re disabled, and we do it all for them and send out parcels by post.  How long do those members who visit tend to stay here?

Have any never emerged from the stacks? [Laughter]

Heuzenroeder: I think some people would like to be lost. It’s very easy for people to become absorbed and lost, in the best sense, and it does feel like a real haven. You step off St James’s Square and you forget you’re in central London. I know that some people come here not to be found, which is lovely, but no, we haven’t found any skeletons in the stacks.

Why is the library such a draw for authors in particular?⁷

Lynn: The reason that the library was founded by Thomas Carlyle was on the basis of what Carlyle couldn’t find anywhere else. This was before the public library system, and the British Library wouldn’t let him take books home, so for him the important thing was that it would let him take books home and read them alone. He said that you can get more out of a book in the comfort of your own home when you’re alone with it in one hour than you could in many days reading it in a public space. So for him it was being able to take the materials home, and not having to work surrounded by other people. But for other writers I think it’s exactly the opposite. Writing is quite a solitary occupation, but being able to come somewhere where you know that the people around you are similarly committed to the endeavour and value of creativity, you feel that you’re not alone, and know that there is this community of the mind, even if you rarely talk to each other. So a lot of different reasons. The depth of the collection that you get here, in one place, on open shelves, is very important. The public libraries could probably get you, through inter-library loan – if you know exactly what you want and ask for it – exactly what you want. But very often you don’t know what you want until you see it, and it’s only when you’re wandering down the stacks looking for something specific that your eye catches on How to Keep Rabbits for Profit and Pleasure, written in the 1920s, and you think, ‘That’s just want I need for my novel’, that bit of detail.

Heuzenroeder: There’s also the quality of the assistance you get from the staff and the depth of their knowledge. You can ask them, ‘I’m interested in Korean pottery of this era’,⁸ and somebody will know exactly what we’ve got and where our strengths and weaknesses are in the collections. And there are more intangible qualities I think. Tom Stoppard, our President, has said that when he passes someone on the stairs of The London Library, that they are on the right side of life, that there’s a set of values that The London Library has and never needs to articulate. But again it’s a very disparate community of readers and members who are standing up for books and knowledge and text.  Lynn: And it’s not just the famous and well-known writers, it’s people at the very beginning of their careers, people who aspire to write a novel and maybe will never get it published.

They’ll be distracted by books on beekeeping and Tupperware… [Laughter]

Lynn: And it’s a huge range down to the core people who just love reading – serious reading – and the Library is a very important place to us. We received a very big legacy a couple of years ago from a woman called Mrs Carr, and she had become a life member at the age of 21, I think. She had been left some money and she decided she would spend it on life membership of The London Library because she said, ‘No matter what else happens in my life, I have no idea whether I’m going to be poor or rich, but I will still be able to read and belong to The London Library’. As it happened actually she did extremely well in life and left us a very large legacy, but it’s that sense that having access to books is important.  Heuzenroeder: Our literary heritage is such a wonderful thing, but it can also sometimes be quite a big thing to overcome because people think that you need to be a famous writer to become a member of The London Library, and actually if you look at our database, what we do when members join, is ask what their occupation is. So you can go back through the database and see people who are now Booker Prize winners or very famous historians, and their occupation will say ‘student’ or ‘bookshop worker’ or ‘researcher’ or whatever, because that’s what they were when they joined. They didn’t join as fully-fledged, lauded public intellectuals, they joined as people who are just like the people who are coming in now working on their first book, or dreaming about becoming this or that.

For more information about The London Library, including details of free tours of the building (definitely worth it) and membership details, head over to londonlibrary.co.uk. To buy a copy of the magazine in which this interview appears, head over to our shop.

Footnotes:

1 ^ Some of these are the ‘load bearing books’ of the headline – the 1890s saw the building of four floors of stacks, designed in a typically robust Victorian way and made from cast-iron, which support the weight of the building directly through the shelving itself. It’s quite a sight.

2 ^ Lynn studied Classics at Liverpool, deciding to train as a librarian after several years in postgraduate research.

3 ^ … Tennyson, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, and, well, you get the picture.

4 ^ This relentless growth means that the Library is always planning (and fundraising for) the next few decades of expansion. The most recent upgrade added 30% to the book capacity, as well as spaces such as the new Art Room. The Library was kept fully operational throughout the renovation work.

5 ^ The Library was founded pre-Dewey Decimal Classification, and so has its own system. One of the categories is ‘Science & Miscellaneous’, which is a catch-all for everything that won’t fit in elsewhere. This results in some amusing sequences.

6 ^ While Heuzenroeder pointed out this one, some of Lynn’s favourite sequences are: ‘Wine, Witchcraft, Women, Wool &c, Wrestling, Yachting’ & ‘Cremation, Cricket, Crime, Crosses, Cruelty to Animals’.

7 ^ A very small selection of authors who were, or still are, members: Arthur Conan Doyle, E.M. Forster, Kingsley Amis, T.S. Eliot, Agatha Christie, A.C. Grayling, Stephen Fry, Monica Ali…

8 ^ The art book collection is one of the gems of the Library, as is the Arts Room itself.

You can buy a copy directly from us at the website, or pick one up from one of our various stockists (a list of which can be found at the previous link). Rough Trade East in London already has their bundle, and the others will be receiving theirs within the week, all being well. If you do happen to be based in London, a copy of the magazine will be on the shelves of the Poetry Library on the South Bank in a couple of days’ time.

We’re really proud of this issue. I hope you get a chance to read it.

— Euan

There are two ways to win one of the couple which remain!

The first will be given to a Structo subscriber chosen at random on the 20th of December, with the book heading out just in time for Christmas. So if you were thinking of taking out a subscription, now might be a good time!

The second draw is open to everyone, whether subscriber or not. To enter, simply email competitions@structomagazine.co.uk, with the phrase ‘Sarah Hall competition’ in the subject line and your address in the body text. We’ll choose somebody at random on the 20th and, all being well with the post office, the winner will have an extra book under the tree come Christmas morning.

Rules/notes: both draws close at midnight on December 19th; UK addresses only please; we won’t use your email address for anything else.

Update 20/12: Both books have now been won! Congratulations to the winners.

Well how about that. We’re now up-to-date on the flip-through front, for another month at least…

— Euan

We’re aiming to break the release pattern for issue six…

— Euan

What follows is the result of an hour or so of searching, and so is by no means complete. If you spot any more good poem collections or stories, please either let us know in the comments, or on Twitter, and I’ll add them in.

The following links are all to Spotify album playlists.

Poetry, individual poets:

• Charles Bukowski — Hostage (read by Charles Bukowski)
• Charles Bukowski — Master Collection (read by Charles Bukowski)
• Lewis Carroll — The Poetry of Lewis Carroll (read by various)
• T.S Eliot — The Waste Land (read by T.S. Eliot)
• T.S. Eliot — The Poetry of T.S. Eliot (read by Robert Speaight and T.S. Eliot)
• Robert Frost — Robert Frost Reads His Poetry – The 1956 Caedmon Recordings (read by Robert Frost)
• Allen Ginsberg — Howl and Other Poems (read by Allen Ginsberg)
• Thomas Hardy — The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (read by various)
• John Keats — Poems by John Keats (read by Margaret Rawlings)
• Percy Bysshe Shelly — The Very Best of Percy Bysshe Shelly (read by various)
• Philip Larkin — Philip Larkin Reads The Less Deceived (read by Philip Larkin)
• Percy Bysshe Shelly — Vincent Price Reads Percy Bysshe Shelly (read by Vincent Price)
• Dylan Thomas — Reading Volume 1 (read by Dylan Thomas)
• Dylan Thomas — Reading Volume 2 (read by Dylan Thomas)

Poetry, collections:

• Words for You — a spectacular collection of poems read by actors including Samantha Morton, Brian Cox, Honor Blackman…
• Words for You – The Next Chapter — another amazing collection featuring Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Helena Bonham Carter…
• The Romantic Poets (read by various)
• Hear Great Poets Read (read by various)
• Hear Great Poets Read , v.2 (read by various)

Stories, short and otherwise:

• William S. Burroughs — The Ultimate Collection (read by William S. Burroughs)
• Anton Chekhov — Anton Chekhov Short Story Collection 1 (read by Max Bollinger)
• Arthur Conan Doyle — The Hound of the Baskervilles (read by Peter Egan)
• Arthur Conan Doyle — The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Vol. 1 (read by Ralph Richardson & John Geilgud)
• Rudyard Kipling — Just So Stories (read by Boris Karloff)
• Edgar Allan Poe — The Mask of the Red Death (read by William S. Burroughs)
• Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Grey (read by Daniel Massey)
• Oscar Wilde — The Importance of Being Earnest (read by various)

Other:

• Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake – Tuned by Allen Ginsberg
• Speaking Personally… Aldous Huxley
• A playlist of all the music mentioned in the works of Haruki Murakami

There are quite a few other classic works on literature there too, but a great deal of them are read by a computer, so I haven’t included them here.

— Euan

 Photo: Kim Aldis

A massive surge of adrenalin. War whoops. Class war whoops. ‘Whoops! Class War!’ A scramble for bricks. ‘I must have a brick. Where are the bricks?’ A hail of bricks. The cops are confused as they realise they are no longer in control. Puppets without a role. They look at us, at one another and around themselves. Them. Run. Away. Down Mayall Road, leaving their vehicles in our hands. In the twinkling of a rioting eye the vehicles are smashed up and turned over.

This is an eyewitness account of the London riots. Not the ones a month ago, but the Brixton riots of 1981. It appears in a report by the ‘We Want to Riot, Not To Work Collective’ in 1982. Despite that being nearly thirty years ago, we haven’t come very far. This isn’t a political piece, but in a fairly short period of time since the coalition came to power we’ve had the student protests, several strikes, a humungous trade union march and now… this. There are individual reasons for each of course, but five years ago, how many would have predicted such events?

Science fiction, with its many faceted sub-genres, is well-known for its attempts at clairvoyance – a position it occupied with some degree of success during the early days of the Space Age. The author as sage: sometimes predicting the bounties of technology, sometimes inventing that technology themselves. Arthur C. Clarke was at least partly responsible for coming up with the geostationary orbit for satellites, something which the world now relies on everyday for communication, but the world of intergalactic space battles and ray guns which was promised never materialised.

There was a small band of SF writers who came into their own just as these over the top space sagas were shown to be just that. J.G. Ballard was one of them and he distinguished himself as a prophet early on in the SF boom, albeit of a very different kind.

Unlike his contemporaries, Ballard took an approach which would become the running theme of almost all his work. Everything he wrote was imbued with scientific pessimism, and each story contained a bunch of vacuous characters who ‘find themselves’ in the chaos of a dystopia.

His 1961 novel The Drowned World was one of the first to suggest that global warming could cause the flooding of the world’s major cities. The Burning World, published in 1964 and since re-titled The Drought, predicted industrial waste entering the sea, preventing evaporation and causing a world-wide drought. In the years since publication, evidence has emerged of similar waste covering large areas of the Pacific Ocean. In 1975’s High Rise, Ballard offers a vision of how tower-block housing projects lead to the isolation of its residents, which in turn leads to the breakdown of social order on a massive scale. These are the kind of tower blocks which they started knocking down a decade ago because of endemic crime.

A streak like that couldn’t last, and inevitably Ballard’s predictions became more fantastical, peaking in 2006 with the rather absurd Kingdom Come. Here’s a version of the blurb:

Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the M25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the centre of this apparently peaceful town, when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers. When the main suspect is released without charge thanks to the dubious testimony of self-styled pillars of the community – including Julia Goodwin, the doctor who treated his father on his deathbed – Richard suspects that there is more to his father’s death than meets the eye, a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall. Determined to unravel the mystery, Richard soon realises that the Metro-Centre, with its round-the-clock cable channel and sports clubs, lies at the very heart of his father’s death. Consumerism rules the lives of everyone in the motorway towns and feeds the cravings of this bored community with its desperate need for something new, whatever the cost. Riots frequently terrorise the streets, immigrant communities are set upon by roving bands of hooligans and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. Gradually, Richard finds himself drawn into this world, caught up in the workings of the mall, exposed to the insides of the consumer dream, and starts upon dismantling this wayward vision his advertising career helped to found! In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to middle England, reflecting an unsettling image of suburbia and revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.

Three years ago, when I read the book, I was behind most of the critics when they panned it. (“this is one of his weakest novels” said The London Book Review; “implausible and unsympathetic” said The Observer). I loved High Rise, Crash and his earlier dystopias, and forgave him the hiccup of The Unlimited Dream Company and Kingdom Come. At the time, it felt like this brilliant mind had given up the things which made him great: trying to convince us that a car dashboard could be erotic or that a motorway junction alone could sustain a man for an indeterminable amount of time. He seemed to me to have regressed into a realm which had already been covered before … and better.

If I want to read about absurd materialism, I’ll pick up Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney. The world of these authors is that of the über-rich, so unobtainable as to be unbelievable and, consequently, pretty damn funny; incongruous enough that when we look in the mirror, and don’t look too closely, we can pretend it doesn’t exist in the real world.

The materialism of Ballard is something a little closer to home, something which I can identify with and understand. In this framework, the absurdity of the rioting and the looting and the murder of Kingdom Come are hollow and unbelievable, and don’t manage to be funny either. So three years ago, I finished the book and put it back on the shelf and easily forgot about it. Until a month ago.

Because a month ago cars were set alight, missiles were thrown, shops were broken into and a girl tried on a pair of looted shoes to make sure they fitted. And a hundred people – from the media, to politicians, to celebrities to people in the pub – postulated and labelled and the words that resonated around us were race and family and community and youth and culture and poverty, and almost everything is found, except the point.

Ballard may have suggested that the rioting would happen in middle-class suburbia, but the similarities are enough to make me feel like I’ve stepped through the looking-glass. That book which was once absurd and unbelievable and – let’s be honest – not very good, is now another to add to Ballard’s successful list of predictions. What comes next?

— Keir

Keir Pratt (@keirpratt) is contributing editor at Structo magazine. This web-exclusive essay is part of his ongoing column The Incidental

You can find the Facebook event page here.

—Euan

At the International Alternative Press Fair last month a couple of rather dapper gents stopped by the Structo stall to have a chat. In the course of things one of the two produced a sheaf of type-written poems, a number of which, he said, were destined for the small press they were in the process of setting up. I told them to let me know when everything was up and running, and so here we are: the début of Peddlers Pozine.

According to the front matter, a pozine is “a periodical publication posing as a zine. containing poems, prose, illustrations and whatever we want. covering all subjects and areas of interest”. This proves to be the case, and it contains all that and more, with part one of a multi-part play rounding out this intriguing first issue.

I have no idea where you can get hold of a copy should you want one, as Peddlers Pozine Publishing are proudly not on-line, but will update if I find out.

Update 04/07: I am reliably informed that you can get your grubby mitts on a copy by sending a £3 postal order to: Peddlers Pozine Publishing, The Nags Head, 53 Kinnerton Street, Belgravia, London, SW1X 8ED.

A pub as their headquarters? Genius!

—Euan

First there’s this:

Issue six of the magazine hit the press in late May, and was officially released on the first of June. The issue features six short stories, 16 poems, a brand-new column and a huge interview with Richard Adams (Watership Down, The Plague Dogs). It’s available at all the usual places, as well as from the website, where you can now also subscribe. Subscribing saves a chunk off the cover price and includes free postage and packing. It’s a bit of a bargain.

The newsprint hadn’t even had time to cool by the time we rocked up to the International Alternative Press Fair, which ran from the 28th to the 29th of May. The two-day fair took over the beautiful main room at the Conway Hall in London, and was home to many lovely creative people and their magazines/books/prints. From there we headed off (via a ‘zine sleepover) to our own proper launch at The Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford.

The launch featured readings from Conan McMurtrie and Will Burns, both of whom have brilliant work in the new issue. We also had a couple of pieces from Oxford native Dan Holloway, who has since gone on to become a best-selling author on Amazon with his novel The Company of Fellows. Are the two things linked? Who knows? All we know is that we’re keeping our fingers crossed for 10%.

—Euan