General Information

The London Library is the world’s largest independent lending library, and one of the UK’s leading literary institutions. Founded in 1841 by a group of men dissatisfied with some of the policies at the British Library, the London Library originally occupied the first floor of the Travellers Club at 49 Pall Mall. Since 1845, it has been based at 14 St James’s Square.

Additional Information

Membership is open to all, on payment of an annual subscription of £435.00. Life membership is available as well, and is on a scale depending on age. Corporate bodies and other institutions can also join at a commercial rate. The library now has 5,445 individual members and 1,343 life members at the end of March 2011.

Collection: Highlights

The library’s collections, which range from the 16th century to the present day, are strong within the fields of literature, fiction, fine and applied art, architecture, history, biography, philosophy, religion, topography, and travel. The library now holds more than one million items, and in 2011 it acquired 8,123 books and periodicals.

Collection: Explained

Periodicals and annuals on a wide range of subjects are also held in the collections. The social sciences are more lightly covered. Pure and natural sciences, technology, medicine and law are not within the library’s purview, although it has some books in all of those fields; books on their histories are normally acquired. The library also subscribes to many e-journals and other online databases.

95% of the collection is housed on open shelves and 97% is available for loan, either on-site or through the post. All post-1950 acquisitions are searchable in the online catalogue, and pre-1950 volumes continue to be added daily as part of the Retrospective Cataloguing Project.

In 1944, some stock was lost to bomb damage and in 1970 its few incunabula were sold. This apart, the library has (except for some duplicates) retained all items acquired since its foundation.

It is a central tenet of the Library that, as books are never entirely superseded, and therefore never redundant, the collections should not be weeded of material merely because it is old, idiosyncratic or unfashionable: except in the case of occasional duplicate volumes, almost nothing has ever been discarded from the Library shelves.