#guildhall library

BOOKS! Used and Abused: What Books Can Tell Us

We all think we know the answer to this – books are full of knowledge or stories – but have you stopped to think about how much they can tell us from the ways they’ve been used, marked, mutilated, sold or bound? Join us for a late view of our new exhibition Books: Used and Abused, at which David Pearson, author of Books as History, will build on the exhibition to explore this theme.

Tomorrow will be your last chance for now to pop into Guildhall Library and see old William’s first folio (good stuff, folios two to five could have done with a little more editing and fewer bear chases tho) as a part of English Tourism Week. But not to worry, what with Shakespril up ahead, no doubt there will be more on the Bard soon enough

And, we are back, all tinselled and mince-pied out. A happy 2017 to you all, and to kick off the year enjoy this 1872 engraving of Guildhall Library from our online collection, Collage. 

We’ve received some mysterious post at Guildhall, which is the best kind of post. Approved. More please. Also, is it just me or is this some kind of sekrit message?

(joins up the dots)

And more on our Dick Whittington archive, this time with a little insight into Ellery Yale Wood, who entrusted Guildhall with this collection.

They were the gift of Ellery Yale Wood, a New Yorker from a wealthy Pennsylvania Quaker background, who moved to England in the 1950s when her marriage broke up, got a job in a London bookshop and developed a serious collecting habit. It progressed after she moved to Wisbech in Cambridgeshire with her partner, Eric Golding, a book dealer, and bought a large Georgian house with an adjoining barn.

“She was an extraordinarily difficult woman, and I say that now with a certain admiration,” said her executor, Brian Lake, of the antiquarian book dealers Jarndyce.

“On one visit she told me she had bought a first edition of Harry Potter, for some four or five thousand pounds, because she thought she should have one. ‘I think I put it over there,’ she said vaguely, and so she had – we eventually found it under 3ft of papers, plastic bags and cat tins.

“On one occasion we were clearing an upstairs room, and we found a large sofa and a desk that we hadn’t even realised were there.”

London Just Inherited This Amazing Dick Whittington Collection:  

Once Upon a Time — as in really quite recently — the Guildhall Library was "astonished" to find it had been bequeathed one of the the world's biggest collections of Dick Whittington memorabilia.

The cache of over 300 books, toys, puzzles, theatre programmes and lantern slides — themed around the man who was Lord Mayor of London four times — was betrothed to the Guildhall by Ellery Yale Wood, the prolific children's book collector.

Wood had been collecting the items for decades, storing them in her home in Wisbech, Lincolnshire, which had a warehouse attached to house her staggering collection of children's books.

The Guildhall Library hosted a very successful Regency dance this week (such cosplay), with some of the attendees accidentally Pride & Prejudicing (I’m not saying people should write fiction based on this image set...but people should write fiction based on this image set).

You can see more images from the dance @GuildhallLib, and if you’re interested in attending the next one, start expressing your interest now via [email protected]. 

According to the CILIP (that’s Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals for the non-Brits) blog, our very own Guildhall Library houses one of the 7 most interesting special collections in the UK and Ireland. 

Collections pertaining to food, wine and cookery at the Guildhall, City of London. The Directory includes many special collections of local relevance (take, for example, a golf collection at St Andrews University) and the printed connection of food with the City of London feels like an extension of this, given that banquets in the City can make news headlines. London’s Guildhall has several collections on matters appealing to the palate with getting on for 7,000 books and pamphlets between them, mostly focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The largest are the libraries of the International Wine and Food Society (3,000 items) and the Institute of Masters of Wine Library (2,100 items from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including auction catalogues). Others stem from the libraries of the cookery writer Elizabeth David and the food writer and potter Mary Wondrausch, from the Guild of Food Writers; and from the Hallgarten family of Hallgarten, Druitt & Novum Wines.