Some thoughts on the dispersal of personal libraries

Hugh Pagan, 11 September 2003 - [ E-mail a Friend ]

At the 2003 London International Antiquarian Book Fair (Olympia, June 5-8) Rachel Lee Rare Books offered as a collection, for a price between £125,000 and £150,000, the working library of the novelist and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch. The library comprised some 1200 items, and contained books on such subjects as philosophy, theology, psychology, poetry, and art, and the authors represented included such favourites of Dame Iris's as Heidegger, Sartre, Jung, Freud. Marx, Weil, Wittgenstein and Plato. Many carried her ownership inscriptions and were annotated in her hand, characteristically on the rear endpapers.

The announcement of the intended sale gave rise to controversy in the media, the view being taken in some quarters that it would be better if the library was split up and books from it dispersed widely among the reading public. In this particular instance such a view seems wholly mistaken, for Iris Murdoch will remain one of the most admired British writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and the merit of keeping her library together is that it will evidence both her preferred reading and the philosophical and literary background from which the texts of her novels evolved. Additionally, it seems reasonable to conjecture that the books are individually of no great value, for she would have acquired them for reading or study, not as a book collector, and therefore that if they are to be dispersed on the market, those that do not carry ownership inscriptions will over time lose their identity as books from her library, even if initially they are supplied with specially printed book labels.

In other instances the arguments may be more evenly balanced. It is certainly desirable that significant libraries belonging to acknowledged great writers of the past which still survive in private hands, most notably that of Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, should wherever possible be preserved intact (and, in the case of Scott's library, in the house where it was formed). There have however been many authors who whether from temperament or from lack of means never bothered to acquire much in the way of books written by other people, and some who had libraries that were simply boring, and it would be absurd if under some doctrine relating to the preservation of cultural property the libraries of each of the hundred best-known British writers of today had necessarily to be offered as a whole to some institution after the deaths of the writers concerned. What has always happened until now, and what should continue to happen in the future, is that the necessary decisions in relation to such libraries should be taken on a case-by-case basis, whether by the inheritors of the books themselves or by the member of the book trade who they may choose to sell the books through or to.

Where a personal library has been formed by a distinguished individual who was not a writer, the position is quite different. Almost no library put together in the nineteenth or twentieth century by a politician, soldier, bishop, judge, captain of industry, theatrical impresario or football manager (if football managers' libraries indeed exist ?), has been deemed to have a heritage value, and such libraries have tended to pass into institutional hands only when they have been gifted in whole or part to a university library or other similar home. The great mass of such libraries are dispersed instead through the auction rooms or as individual items by an antiquarian bookseller, and all that can be expected of the auction house or antiquarian bookseller through whose hands the books pass is that when they sell the books, the books should be properly described and the identity of the individual who collected them should be clearly stated.

In these enlightened days antiquarian booksellers customarily discharge these responsibilities conscientiously, but there have been instances in the not too distant past where the great auction houses, whether as a result of convoluted issues of vendor confidentially, or through ignorance or muddle within their book departments, have failed to state plainly who put together the libraries that they are offering for sale. Thus, the library of the nineteenth century Conservative statesman Henry Goulburn, put through Christie's South Kensington rooms in a series of sales some years back, would surely have done better for its vendors if each instalment of the books had been clearly marketed as part of Goulburn's personal library, and it is similarly not clear why the same firm did not make more of a fascinating residue of books from the libraries of Richard Monckton Mills (Lord Houghton) and of his son, the 1st Marquis of Crewe, dispersed in a confused manner through sales both at King Street and at South Kensington.

Yet one should not be too hard on the auction houses in this respect, for any antiquarian bookseller who regularly attends London sales must recognise the combination of romance and intellectual challenge inherent in the description of a particular group of lots as "the property of a nobleman", and we would certainly feel deprived if on each and every occasion the particular auction house concerned saw it as its duty to work out and to state exactly in its catalogue which eighteenth-century aristocrat, or, as it might alternatively be, late twentieth century life peer, had originally put together the group of books concerned.