Randomeanderings: Useful and useless things, random assorted ideas and general waffle

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Part time poet, full time librarian, student of the delights of milk chocolate. Likes books, milk, paddling, poetry, scribbling, chocolate, notebooks, sea, piers. Not necessarily in that order. All work copyright cih.

Thursday 14 August 2014

Hunting lost libraries

This evening I have been mainly appealing to my own sense of the ridiculous. I have been sighted several times in various locations with a large group of people looking at things which are no longer there. While being heavily rained on by the British Summertime.

We were on a walking tour of Lost Libraries.  

As a non-librarian friend queried: 'lost because they floated away?'. 

No, but given the dampness of the participants and the day, they could well have done. It may have been a good thing that in many of the cases there was little to see - perhaps a blue plaque with the legend "Bert Bloggs lived 'ere".  Our umbrellas were so crowded together that viewing was generally limited.  In fact the  visuals probably similar to those that the grass under a clump of toadstools manages to have.  

For anyone who looked at our merry band and wondered what we were doing, well,  we were obviously a tour group. Yet possibly not tourists though.  We took shortcuts,  dared to walk across the road at nondesignated crossing places... So definitely not tourists.  We were far too comfortable with the city.

What of these poor lost libraries anyway.  Were they even libraries?  Or merely massive book collections,  printed material hoarded by people rich enough to have this as a hobby? Such as the minister who was wealthy enough to create a theological library to house his texts and to had an architect friend design him a building to put it in (a chap you may have heard of called Wren).  

Only one woman had a library - Queen Caroline.  However she could probably afford it. 

Sadly most of the libraries were lost when the collectors died. Occasionally the libraries were bought by university libraries (in America or England) but more usually they were broken up and no-one knows where the books went. 

Unless you do?