The membership records of one of London’s oldest libraries have gone online, revealing the famous figures who joined the institution.
The London Library was founded in 1841 and remains at the heart of London literary life today.
70,000 membership records dating from 1841 to 1950 are now available to search in the new London Library Digital Archive (https://londonlibrary-archives.co.uk/).
Library Archivist Nathalie Belkin said that the digitisation was necessary to preserve the original membership forms, which were kept in bound volumes.
“They were very thick and too tight,” she said. “A lot of the text block was getting lost. You couldn't read it. And also the pages were quite brittle because the paper wasn't such good quality. I was worried we were losing them. Due to how tightly they were compressed, bits were curling. I thought, ‘If we don’t do something to preserve as a whole and make these accessible, they’re going to be lost forever’.”
She said the volumes were disbounded and cleaned by Temple Bookbinders.
“Once they came back, I did a quality control just to check on them, make sure the forms were okay,” she said. “And they were, and then I sent them off to be digitised with TownsWeb Archiving. They did all the digitisation for us and all the transcription of the metadata.”
The new database of membership records includes many prominent writers and other figures who have joined the London Library over the years.
Among them are Sir Terence Rattigan (1911-77), the author of acclaimed plays including The Winslow Boy and The Deep Blue Sea.
Renowned television cook Fanny Cradock (1909-94) also appears in a register of withdrawn members from 1972.
“The library has had a lot of chefs and cooks and food writers in membership historically,” Nathalie Belkin said. “So I was intrigued by her.”
Digitising the archives also revealed records relating to American writer Mark Twain (1835-1910), the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
“I was looking for somebody else under the C in the year 1896,” Nathalie said. “And I flew past it and thought, ‘I know that name’. I saw Samuel L. Clemens [Twain’s real name]. Chatto & Windus, his publishers for the year that he lived here in England, sponsored him for membership because he wouldn't have been able to become a member without getting sponsorship here. And since this programme of digitisation and disbinding, I was able to read the entire letter and find out that it was actually him that wanted to become the member, because he wanted a place to research while he lived in the country.”
The digital archive was supported by the Unwin Charitable Trust with seed funding from Mark Storey.
