About the Library

In June 1708 bookseller John Bagford, in an account of libraries in London for the Monthly Miscellany, remarked “The Quakers have been some years collecting a Library, but where it is erected I have not learned.” This was not surprising, since though the Society of Friends had been collecting books since 1673, the collection had no permanent home for many years  - and it was not until 1926 when Friends House was constructed that the Society finally had a purpose-built library.
 
In 1673 the Second Day Morning Meeting had agreed to acquire two copies of everything written by Quakers – and one copy of the everything written in opposition. At first  this collection was housed in the offices of the Recording Clerk “at Friends Chamber” in Three Kings Court, off Lombard Street in the City, where the central offices remained until moved to Devonshire House in Bishopsgate in1794. In 1711 it was proposed to Meeting for Sufferings “to have a Press or two placed up to preserve friends books that lyes open to the Dust”. In 1721 Sufferings agreed “To have Baggs in Readyness, in Case of Fire, at or near Friends Chamber to Carry off the Books and Records kept there…”

In 1794 in the proposals for extensions at Devonshire House included a “Clerk’s House and a Library”. Yet by 1815 the collection was already too big for the designated room on the ground floor and the books were removed to “the room where Meeting for Sufferings met”.

In 1901, when the first librarian, Norman Penney (1858-1933) was appointed, there were three strong rooms for the archives and locked cupboards for books in meeting rooms, but still no dedicated reading room. The re-designation of one room as “The Reference Library” in 1902 was a major step, but it was still used as a meeting room too. Books had to be cleared away whenever the room was required for meetings, and the card catalogue was on wheels so that it could be taken down to the strong-room every night. 

Mobile card catalogue (c.1920). Today's catalogue is online.

It is a tribute to the work of Norman Penney that by the time Friends House was planned it was beyond question that a purpose-built library with a reading room, stacks and  strong rooms for archives and rare material, should be an integral part of the new building. Today the reading room, though refurbished in the 1990s, remains essentially as architect Hubert Lidbetter designed it in 1926, while the book collection policy remains essentially the same as in 1673.