Bodleian Library

Before you can read in the Bodleian, you make a promise. New readers sign a declaration, and readers from outside the university still recite it aloud: not to remove, mark or damage anything, and not to bring fire or flame into the library or light one there. The Latin original comes from a time when libraries went unheated because fires were too dangerous. The admissions office holds translations in more than a hundred languages.

The library that asks for this oath once stood nearly empty. Oxford had built a room for its books above the Divinity School, completed in 1488 and still named Duke Humfrey’s Library after the duke whose manuscripts filled it. By the late 16th century its furniture had been sold and only three of his books remained. In 1598 Thomas Bodley, a former fellow of Merton College, offered to restore the room at his own cost. It reopened on 8 November 1602 with around 2,000 books and his name.

Bodley’s decisive move came in 1610. He agreed with the Stationers’ Company that a copy of every book registered with it would go to the library, an arrangement later carried into the law of legal deposit. The collection grew so fast that the building was extended twice within three decades. By 1620 it held 16,000 items, and anyone who wanted to use them had to buy that year’s printed catalogue, an early answer to the question of how a library catalogue works.

The Bodleian now holds more than 13 million printed items, second in Britain only to the British Library. It remains a reference library. As a rule, nothing leaves the reading rooms.