Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Comité International des Bibliothèques. 3:e session. Stockholm 20—21.8. 1930. Actes - XVII. The Libraries of Great Britain and Ireland, 1929—30. (Mr. A. Esdaile)
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71
Louterell in about 1340, and adorned with realistic miniatures of daily and especially
of agricultural life, for which in the generation before the Black Death it is the chief
source of our knowledge; and (b) the Psalter and Book of Hours, executed in about 1415
by one Herman in the East Anglian style for John Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V.
of England; the illuminations are perhaps not one of the finest spécimens of the school,
but include an unique series of roundel miniature portraits. A fluorescent cabinet
has been installed and has already given good results in reading faded ms.
At the end of the present year Sir Frederic Kenyon, who has since 1909 been
Director and Principal Librarian, will retire. It is needless for me to enlarge on the great
services which Sir Frederic has given to the Museum and to the world, both at home
and abroad, of museums and of libraries; you will all know him. His successor has not
yet been appointed.
Other National and University libraries.
The National Library of Scotland, formerly the Advocates’, is still waiting for
the rebuilding of other Government buildings in Edinburgh which is necessary before
the ground can be cleared and the new building, due to Sir Alexander Grant’s gift
of £ 100,000, commenced. Meanwhile the nationalisation in name as well as in spirit
of the library has touched the Scottish people’s patriotism, and many gifts, chiefly of
manuscripts by famous Scotsmen, Sir Walter Scott, Burns, Carlyle, and so on, have
come in, in addition to Lord Rosebery ’s Scottish books from Barnbougle Castle, and
the Reid bequest of Lauriston House (home of Law the financier) with its library and
an endowment.
The Cambridge University Library, which for years past has been in extreme
dif-ficulties for want of space, is to be rehoused in a completely new building; plans by Sir
Giles Gilbert Scott have been accepted and construction will soon be begun. The cost
will be about £ 500,000, and is part of a large scheme which also includes the
endowment of certain branches of scientific teaching; of the total sum required, £ 1,179.000,
the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Trust offered £ 700.000 on condition
that the remaining £ 479,000 was raised otherwise; Mr. Stanley Baldwin, the Ex Prime
Minister and new Chancellor of the University, recently announced that the feat had
been accomplished.
The Bodleian Library at Oxford has the same problem, but it is complicated by
the désire to retain the old building, and particularly «Duke Humphrey’s»; a completely
new building on a new site, which had many advocates among modernists, was
re-jected; and it is proposed to build a new building for half the library on the other side
of Broad Street, connected by an underground passage with the old. Commissions of
enquiry, financed by the Rockefeller Trust, are travelling in Europe and America on
behalf of both the Oxford and the Cambridge Libraries.
Dr A. E. Cowley, Bodley’s Librarian, will retire probably during the Coming year.
Like Sir Frederic Kenyon, he is well known to his continental colleagues.
The University of London Library does not occupy the same position in the
University that the Bodleian and Cambridge libraries do, since some of its constituent Colleges
and schools have even more important libraries of their own. But it is large and
growing, and now that the central University offices and institutions are to be moved from
South Kensington to Bloomsbury the Committee proposes to take the opportunity
of the new building to provide for future expansion and the rise of the library to the
commanding position in the University which is its right.
Lörd Brotherton’s gift of £100.000 towards the new library of the University of
Leeds was announced in the previous year. Plans have been accepted, and the founda-
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