Library Collection


As I put the final touches to my book’s draft manuscript, I realized that I had achieved a new status as a scholar. For the first time, I now have a reader’s card for four of the five legal deposit libraries in the UK.

One of the rules I have given myself as an academic is that I will always try and separate my work and home lives. I do not, if I can possibly avoid it, do any work in my home. I do everything academic either in my office or in a library, and this has led me to spend a lot of time à la bibliothèque.

Of these four libraries, each has taken on a different role for me. The British Library is quite an intense space: I often go there with a very specific thing to see and a very limited (and expensive) time window in which to do it. Of all of the reading room tribes of the BL, I find myself most at home among the denizens of Rare Books and Music.

The National Library of Scotland, because of its proximity to Newcastle, is a more relaxed venue. I go there to consult stuff that I cannot inter-library loan, but I also go there when I need a place to work undisturbed. Some of the best paragraphs I’ve written have been in its reading room.

Much to my shame, I’ve only been to the Bodleian once, so it doesn’t have much of an identity for me yet. I hope to get to know it better in the future. This is the exact opposite of Cambridge’s UL, which I still know very well. Just in case you’re curious: I like working in the North Wing or North Front, as high up and as far away from other people as possible. Next best, especially when I used to suffer from hayfever, is the Rare Books Reading Room. Unless I was reading old stuff, both these locations entailed a fair bit of walking (not least because stuff about acting, at least during my PhD, was shelved some fair distance from material about literature) – but, like the lack of human contact in my preferred seating, I view these required perambulations as a positive.

All I need to do now is to find a reason to get to the National Library of Wales…

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