HISTORIC LIBRARY.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20540, 15 February 1935, Page 5

HISTORIC LIBRARY.

Founded by Famous Mayor of London. EARLY THEFT OF BOOKS. London’s Guildhall possesses as fine a reference thanks to the City Corporation’s liberality, as the student could desire. It looks back over five hundred years, says the London “ Daily Telegraph.” Not, it is true, without a break, and a long one, for there is a gap of centuries to be bridged. Richard Whittington, most famous of the great line of London’s mayors, was its founder. On his death in 1423 he left a vast fortune for that day, for dispersal by his executors. Among their duties was the task of building and equipping what was to become the first public library. It consisted of manuscripts at the outset. Then came the invention of printing, and we know that the library established at Guildhall acquired printed books, for there was a dastardly theft of them. It was carried out under the mask of a loan. The Protector Somerset in 1549 had just built his great house in the Strand. It needed books for his comfort. His method was to send to Guildhall for them, promising that they should be restored. “ Men laded from thence three carries with them, but they were never returned,” says the Elizabethan chronicler, John Stow. Such was the untimely end of Whittington’s library. The building by Guildhall Chapel in which the books were stored was turned into a market house for the sale of clothes, afterwards to become famous as Blackwell Hall cloth market. It was not till 1828 that Guildhall Library was revived, with books for the use of members of the Corporation. Later its advantages were freely given to the public. The library boasts amongst many possessions of the greatest rarity an autograph signature of Shakespeare. It appears on a deed of purchase of a house in Blackfriars.