The library I love

Author William Boyd has spent many hours researching his books in the London Library

12 April 2012

When I moved to London in 1983 I knew I would need a library. Living in Oxford for eight years had made me used to working in libraries: I had written my first novel, A Good Man in Africa, in the Bodleian Library and I wrote my second, An Ice-Cream War, in Rhodes House Library (one of Oxford's best-kept secrets, as it happens).

It didn't matter to me that there were other people in the room, moving about, that there were whispered conversations, pages being turned, sighs and coughs and sniffles. I liked the atmosphere of study, of being surrounded by intellectual effort of some sort - a library, I had found, was very conducive to novel-writing.

But where to go in London? A friend suggested I check out the London Library in St James's Square. I paid it a visit and instantly fell in love with the place. It seemed old, venerable, as if held in some kind of time warp. You walked in through the glass doors off the square and you could have been back in the Fifties, or even the Thirties.

Past the large wooden desk and the catalogues up the stairs to the capacious reading room. There was something slightly fusty, shabby-genteel about the place, as if you might have encountered EM Forster or Virginia Woolf coming down the stairs as you ascended.

It was in the reading room where I settled. It was a high-windowed, highceilinged room, overlooking the plane trees of St James's Square, with many desks and a galleried walkway to give you access to the higher bookshelves. Periodicals - commonplace and arcane - were available for consultation.

A row of old leather armchairs faced the fireplace. Silence inside, a distant hum of London's traffic outside - you were only 200 yards from Piccadilly Circus, after all. I felt instantly at home. In fact it was almost like being in someone's house rather than an institution.

And so I instantly joined and the London Library became the place I set out to almost every weekday morning. Another reason was that in our small, terraced house in Fulham my "study" was a kind of box-room, about four feet by six. After an hour at the desk, claustrophobia drove you out.

Far better to take the District Line from Fulham Broadway to Green Park, saunter past the Ritz, turn right at Fortnum and Mason and head down Duke Street (pausing to look in the galleries) on the way to the London Library and a day's writing (10am-4pm with a break for lunch).

All this makes it sound very congenial but, as important as the "feel" of the London Library is with its unique, English charm, its great value for a writer - and one that makes it increasingly rare in this day and age - is that you can gain access to the stacks.

There are more than a million volumes shelved in the London Library stacks and to be able to roam freely about their many storeys, along the narrow walkways flanked by books on each side, is an amazing privilege and blessing.

Most libraries ask you to look the book up in the catalogue and then order it. The advantage to a novelist - more of a magpie brain than a scholar's - of being able to browse is extraordinary. This element of the haphazard that browsing allows can produce amazing results. Time and again I've stumbled across books that I would never have thought to consult.

This is very useful, but for people who have never been to the London Library stacks it's important also to register the particular physical aspect of the place. Beneath your feet are heavy, cast-iron grids. Look down through as many floors as your eye can travel or, tilting your head, look up. It's akin to being in some sort of ancient power station cum vast submarine.

There are no windows. It's dark, it smells frowstily of books. You light your way by switching on fluorescent tubes that crackle and flicker into life (providing also the special London Library charge of static electricity whenever you touch anything metal).

The stacks seem to go on for ever, floor after floor, like Gormenghast castle. Occasionally you encounter another reader searching for a book but most of the time you feel alone. You can get lost in the library stacks. You find a door, blunder out and discover you're two stories below the street in a basement filled with ancient journals.

You head back, climb and climb, following arrows that direct you to "History", " Fiction", "Biography A-H". The London Library stacks must be one of the most atmospheric places in the entire city. An experience never to be forgotten but available, alas, only to members.

Of course, time has moved on. There are computers and sophisticated machinery replacing the filing cards and the scraps of paper. It's a noticeably smarter place since I first joined. The last-but-one librarian, Alan Bell (who had been librarian at Rhodes House, incidentally), had the place redecorated with great taste and class. It has lost none of its charm, though it is now discreetly, yet recognisably, in the 21st century.

I wrote three more novels in the London Library before I moved to a bigger house with a study you could swing a cat in, and so in recent years I have gone there less than I used to. And, of course, the internet is a boon for authors needing to do research. But not entirely, and the lure of the stacks draws me back, time and again.

When I was writing my last novel, Any Human Heart, I wanted to discover how corned beef was made. The internet could only provide me with 50,000 recipes that used corned beef, but not the industrial process, bafflingly. I went to the London Library and disappeared into the stacks for an afternoon. I found the answer, not under "Cookery" or "Beef" or "Agriculture" but in "Topography".

There, in the section labelled Uruguay, I found the book I was after, written at the end of the 19th century, dusty and probably unopened for decades. I took it up to the reading room, sat at a desk and made my notes.

Outside, a wintry dusk was settling on St James's Square, someone was asleep in front of the fire, there was the rustle of paper as pages were turned. I sensed a kind of deliciously familiar contentment. I felt I had come home.

Membership of the London Library, 14 St James's Square, SW1, is open to all, by annual subscription, from £180 pa. Information: 020 7766 4720 or www.londonlibrary.co.uk

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