Historic collection

The Oxford Union Library holds around 48,000 books.  About half are modern publications, both academic and recreational, and these are the books most heavily used on a day-to-day basis by Union members.  The rest of the books make up the “historic collection”.  Most of these books date back to the nineteenth century, though a small proportion are older. 

At the time that the collection was started, undergraduates had limited access to libraries and the curriculum they studied was quite narrowly defined.  When the Union was founded in 1823, it provided the opportunity for undergraduates to debate and to read much more widely than was generally encouraged in the University.  The Union Library has always collected controversial, quirky and unusual books and now has a fascinating collection particularly of nineteenth century material, some of which is not available anywhere else in the Oxford University libraries.

Here are some examples of the kind of books you might find in the historic collection:

o       Nineteenth century pamphlets on all sorts of subjects from politics to poetry; from philosophy to the internal workings of the University of Oxford.  Indeed, the pamphlet collection is a microcosm of the library collection as a whole.  Pamphlets were collected as they were published and bound together into volumes.

o       Accounts of nineteenth century travel and exploration – Captain Cook and David Livingstone to name but two

o       Some seventeenth and eighteenth century books, mainly on historical and theological subjects.  All are leather-bound and in desperate need of conservation

o       Ordnance Survey maps from the nineteenth and early 20th century, collected together into huge leather-bound volumes

o       Collected works of key British and European authors of the nineteenth century 

o       Music scores – mostly piano music and opera – but too fragile now to play from

o       Collected scientific and mathematical papers, for example Laplace, Gauss and James Clerk Maxwell

o       And last but not least, the Union Library’s own accession lists.  This is a record of each book that the Library acquired, in the order that the Library acquired them

Return to Adopt a book main page.