The Library Wants Everything

 

Collectors of supernatural fiction may sometimes see in the catalogues of fantasy book dealers the notation ‘Not in Bleiler’, meaning that the book is not in E F Bleiler’s magisterial Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983), with its 1,175 entries, a sure sign therefore of rarity or obscurity. This is thrilling enough for the collector of fantastic literature, but there is an even more rarefied notation: ‘Not in the British Library’.

If you issue any publication in the UK, you are required to send one free copy, of the best quality, to the British Library: they say this has been part of English law since 1662. To illustrate how comprehensive this requirement is they currently have a cartoon reading ‘The Library Wants Everything’ with a purple-haired youth asking ‘What, even my Cthulhu fan comic?’

You are also required, if requested, to send free copies to five other libraries, those at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin, and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales. These five usually have an agent to act on behalf of all of them. When I was first publishing booklets, the agent was the slightly sinister-sounding A T Smail, the sort of name a seedy private investigator in a Gerald Kersh or Derek Marlowe novel might have.

The six together are sometimes called ‘copyright libraries’, but in fact they do not really relate to copyright at all: the technical term is ‘legal deposit libraries’.

It was only when I pursued my book-collecting into ever more obscure byways that I came to realise that not every UK publication is in fact held by the British Library, or the other five libraries. There were two titles in particular where I first noticed this. One was A Book of Deadly Sonnets (1909) by ‘N.B.’, no imprint stated, which I had picked up in Richard Booth’s at Hay-on-Wye.

This is by the rather wonderful Edwardian fantasy and nonsense poet Norman Boothroyd, and I think it is almost certainly self-published. Most of the contents were included in a later volume, Apes and Peacocks, Verses in Varied Vein (Erskine Macdonald, 1913). But there is no copy of the first book in any of the legal deposit libraries.

The other title was a thriller, The Golden Snake by Donald Campbell, a Sax Rohmer pastiche issued by the Federation Press, a pulp publisher. I had found a very tatty copy and noticed that, as well as the title story, there was a breathless filler in which one of the characters was clearly based on Aleister Crowley, so I got it mostly on the strength of that. I included this story, ‘The Necromancer’, in my anthology of occult detective stories, The Black Veil (2008). There is a copy of The Golden Snake in the British Library, but not, so far as I can see, in any of the other five.

What sort of books eluded the great libraries? Well, I alluded to them in my story ‘The Scarlet Door’ (Supernatural Tales 35, 2017, collected in The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things). The protagonists are trying to track down and hide books that have not yet been digitised: they want to keep some works secret and offline. ‘Poetry, pornography and prophecy’ says a character, those are the sort of books that escape. Another wants to add pottery – ‘crack-pottery’.

The kinds of books that may not have been sent to the British Library include those that are self-published, where the author did not know of, or care about, the requirement. These are often of poetry or of apocalyptical utterances or of eccentric ideas, or even, treasured tome, of some admingling of all three.

Another reason for absence is that it may not have been well understood that the requirement doesn’t only apply to books, but to every form of publication, including booklets, leaflets, guides, maps, programmes, brochures etc. I have certainly found that eg church guides, theatre programmes, local town maps, printed cricket scorecards and similar are only haphazardly represented, and the same will no doubt be so for many zines of all kinds, Cthulhu or otherwise.

 It therefore adds an enjoyable extra zest to book-collecting expeditions when the rummaging produces certain items that look as if they might not have found their way to the vast holdings of the British Library. A quick check later, surrounded by the spoils, soon reveals whether this hunch is right or not. There are just enough not there that it’s possible to imagine a collection comprised entirely of such publications. It would certainly make for interesting reading. 

(Mark Valentine)