The Students' Guide to the Libraries of London : With an Account of the Most Important Archives and Other Aids to Study

University of London Press, Ltd., London, third, revised and enlarged edition, 1927. Cloth, 8vo,. xxv, 580, [1] pp, 61 plates. I A Williams in the London Mercury wrote; "it deals with every kind of library, apart from the purely personal libraries of private individuals, even down to the small highly specialised collections of books possessed by such bodies as the National Society for the Prevention of Criielty to Children, the Royal National Life-Boat Institution, and the Proportional Representation Society. An interesting by-path in the library world of London is that along which lie the Club libraries. Some of these are, as we might suspect, very considerable affairs. The Athenaeum Club, for instance, which has the largest library of any London Club, possesses seventy-five thousand volumes ; the Reform Club comes next with almost sixty-thousand volumes ; and the National Liberal Club is third with thirty-one thousand volumes of books and a remarkable collection of thirty-three thousand political pamphlets, many of which are (as pamphlets are apt to become) extraordinarily rare and interesting. The only other Clubs that possess thirty thousand or more volumes are the Carlton Club and the Constitutional Club, with about thirty-five thousand each, and the Oxford and Cambridge University Club, with thirty thousand. Another, even more unexpected, kind of library, that is described in Mr. Rye's Guide, consists of the collections owned by some of the large publishing houses. Among these may be mentioned the libraries of Messrs. Macmillan & Co. and of Messrs. A. & C. Black, in the latter of which there is an interleaved set of Sir Walter Scott's works in which he marked all his final corrections. Covers somewhat faded, contents agetoned, otherwise Good.