‘Don’t offend the Opus Dei of British intellectual life,’ texts one member. ‘I need to think about whether there is any universe in which I would gossip… Probably not,’ replies another. A third says only: ‘I’m not sure how much help I can be; I’d hardly know where to begin.’ Few wanted to talk. Those who did spoke only on condition of strict anonymity.
I’m investigating the scene at the London Library, an odd sprawl of a St James’s townhouse that has grown over a century and a half into a confusing maze of concrete, books and glass. Within you’ll find ancient copies of the Spectator and forgotten Victorian folios on East Anglian eels. You’ll also find writers, published and aspiring.
Members seem a trusting lot, leaving coats and bags in the Issuing Hall and laptops unattended for hours on end. ‘I’ve never worried about anything being stolen,’ one writer says, ‘apart from an advanced copy of Sally Rooney.’ I joined the London Library when I first became a journalist with dreams of flopping listlessly in dark leather armchairs reading Huysmans. Instead, I mainly use its online resources to search for academic papers or humorous Who’s Who entries, matching up whether Rachel Johnson and former Times editor John Witherow really are members of the same very exclusive west London tennis club (they are).
Those members who were brave enough to speak were convinced that they were working beside some of the brightest minds in British literature. ‘They seem like they’re just sitting around but a lot of them are brilliant people,’ one tries to reassure me. ‘I sat next to Jacques Testard as he was editing The Books of Jacob,’ says another, ‘He had printed it out onto 1,000 pages of A4.’ One other member spotted renowned humourist, Bill Bryson, ‘very performatively failing to understand how a printer works’.
A few years ago, the London Library was presented as something of an intellectual ‘Soho House’ by the New York-based publication Air Mail. ‘The Library is buzzing with young people,’ buzzes the young Air Mail writer (also, I’m told, a member), ‘in the writers’ room, a group of lamp-lit desks hum quietly with collective endeavour.’ It’s a quaint picture. But in reality, I get the sense that the place is as much a crèche for trust-funded literary wannabes as it is a working library for grumpy academics and novelists.
‘There’s a weird older generation and a younger group of journalists and novelists and not much in between,’ explains one (published) writer. ‘One older guy wears a military uniform from a costume shop.’ A friend reports a phone call about a party she overheard in the common room at the top of the building: ‘I feel like this has been organised callously and it’s frankly not in the spirit of the North London Collegiate School. You should apologise to Izzy and me.’
There is also, it seems, a culture of romance between the bookshelves. ‘It’s very incestuous,’ one member tells me. ‘I think lots of people have slept with lots of other people from the library. I’ve slept with someone who’s a member. I only realised when there was a fire alarm and there he was, outside. There’s definitely a healthy sexual environment.’
‘I’m not going to tell you which of these people has got off with each other,’ says another. ‘It would be like throwing a dart at… whatever the metaphor is’. A historian friend admits to an illicit fumble in the backstacks. ‘There was definitely groping… I blame the sexiness of the mouldering book smell’. One journalist reportedly told a female acquaintance that he felt he could no longer enter the building, on account of ‘shagging too many of the other members’. On my most recent visit, I saw him sitting in the main reading room (‘the place you go to be seen,’ according to a freelance critic).
