S.S. Collection

PATRICK J. KEARNEY & DAVID BOOTHROYD NOTES TOWARDS A CATALOGUE OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY ’S S.S. COLLECTION LONDON & SANTA ROSA 2013 Introduction The Discovery: The S.S. collection is an informally catalogued accumula- tion of books, periodicals and other material that has for a va- riety reasons, to be described below, been suppressed and is kept from public access. The first open discussion of the S.S. of any significance appeared in Peter Fryer’s Private Case, Public Scandal (1966), a marvellous little polemic that grew out of research he was doing towards a history of contraception. 1 Fryer found that a number of books he needed to refer to in the course of his work were kept in the British Library’s Private Case, their extensive erotica collection. 2 Unlike most other national or academic libraries that have erotic or obscene material on their shelves, the British Library did not include it in their General Catalogue, but did maintain a separate and effectively secret catalogue of it, a copy of which was kept at the issuing desk in the Reading Room. A reader who was persistent enough could find out if a book he wanted was in the Private Case, and pro- vided he could establish a good enough reason to see it would be given to him or her. 3 Below the level of the Private Case, though, Fryer found an even more closely guarded cache of books, which he be- came aware of when investigating Charles Bradlaugh M.P., a radical Victorian champion of woman’s suffrage and contraception, who was libelled in an 1888 biography of him by Charles R. Mackay which was kept at the time in the S.S. This discovery led Fryer to examine the collection as best as 1 Peter Fryer, The Birth Controllers (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965). 2 Strictly speaking, the British Library was not in existence when Fryer was working there; it was actually created on 1 July 1973 as a result of the British Library Act 1972. Prior to that date the Library was part of the British Museum. For convenience it will be referred to as the British Library throughout this paper. 3 Due in large part to Fryer’s work, the contents of the Private Case are now entered into the General Catalogue, and access to the collection has been much eased. My own catalogue of the collection was published by Jay Landesman in 1981. 2 could and devote a chapter to it in Private Case, Public Scan- dal . A The Sources: The following catalogue is based on four separate short- title lists: 1945 List A Xerox copy of the S.S. catalogue as it ex- isted in 1945. This was given to me in 1991 by the late Gershon Legman who had him- self received it in 1945 from Henry Thomas, Keeper, Department of Printed Books. 2005 List A Word document supplied to me in July 2005 by Duncan G. Heyes, Curator, Modern British Collections. 2008 List An 18-page Excel spreadsheet supplied to me in July 2008 under the 2000 UK Free- dom of Information Act by Alison Bailey, Information Champion, British & Early Printed Collections. 2011 List An Excel spreadsheet supplied to David Boothroyd by Catherine Atkinson, a Free- 3 dom of Information official at the British Library, in October 2011. This spreadsheet is identical to the preceding, save for an additional fifty-two titles which are without pressmarks because “they are in the process of being added to the Suppressed Safe Col- lection.” The entries for them appearing in the catalogue that follows are in their appro- priate place, by author/title, with a note ap- pended explaining the absence of an SS pressmark. More than a few of the additional entries in the 2011 spreadsheet are for quite elderly titles, one published as early as 1906. In response to a request for information on these, an email from Ms. Alison Bailey, now Curator of Printed Histori- cal Sources at the BL, informed me that the reason for the presence of the older titles was because they had been “delib- erately damaged by readers in recent years” and replacements found for them. A Readers’ Ticket to the BL is not easily acquired, and it’s disagreeable to think that people with the bona fides to secure one are capable of such disgusting behaviour. It is, however, interesting to ponder on the fact that so many of the vandalised books are for specific authors. There are, for example, are no less than six books by or about T. S. Eliot and five for Arthur Symons, and one might give some thought as to exactly what form this damage took. Simple physical damage – torn pages or bindings for example – could be repaired ‘in-house’ by the BL’s excellent preservation and restoration department unless the books were beyond repair, in which case why keep them at all if they could be replaced? And missing pages or illustra- tions could be replaced with clean Xerox or photographic fac- similes from sound copies. In a flight of fancy, perhaps the vandalism was of a more sinister character, consisting of libel- lous or obscene hand-written annotations which might open the BL to legal action for ‘publishing’ a libel by permitting readers to see them? Whatever the situation, Ms Bailey, in a second email, con- firmed that “the replacement copies have been assigned the [pressmarks] of the original volumes. A note in each item in- dicates that it is a replacement copy.” 4 In the course of adding the new titles from the 2011 spreadsheet to the catalogue, emails were written to the authors or publishers of three of the more recently published items requesting information as to why the books in questions should be in the SS. One was ignored, but the authors or publishers of the other two – Kevin Allen’s Elgar in Love (2000) and Gentlemen’s Dress Accessories (1987) by Eve Eckstein and J & G. Firkins – replied, saying that they had no idea why their publications should have been withdrawn by the British Library, and it was the first they’d heard of it. This led me to think, rashly, that perhaps all fifty-two new titles may have been suppressed because of reader’s vandalism, but a request to Ms. Alison Bailey for confirmation of this idea led to the following email: “As I suggested in my e-mail of 7 August, material which has been added to the list of the contents of the Suppressed Safe Collection since Autumn 2008 falls into several categories. These categories include items which have been received by the Library but which, for example, have subsequently been withdrawn by the publisher, or contain personal information that falls within the scope of UK data protection legis- lation. Some material has been subJect to legal action outside the Library.” In addition, there are a number of titles whose presence in the S.S. collection is suspected, but which don’t appear in any of the four preceding documents, nor in the online Integrated Catalogue, and a handful which certainly were in the S.S. at one time, but for brief periods. The former were culled from the final chapter of Peter Fryer’s Private Case, Public Scandal (1966) and the latter from P.R. Harris’ A History of the British Museum Library 1753-1973 (1998). All four of these documents, as they stand, pose significant problems, and it is to be hoped that these notes, while not solving all of them, will perhaps throw some light on the sub- Ject and allow others to investigate further. The biggest difficulty facing anyone attempting to deal with the S.S., is the fact that its contents are not included in the General Catalogue, hereinafter, following British Library practice, called G.K. 4 According to Peter Fryer, a separate 4 The ‘K’ in G.K. is the initial letter of the Greek word for ‘catalogue.’ The placers at the British Library would underline in pencil on the titlepage of 5 catalogue of the S.S. was kept at the inquiry desk in the Read- ing Room until the Spring of 1965, but following an exchange of correspondence with the Principal Keeper on the subJect of his being allowed to examine it Fryer had to report that it was removed “for administrative reasons.” 5 An attempt I made to see the catalogue fifteen years later were equally fruitless, but the Freedom of Information Act of 2000 has had the effect of weakening the library’s secrecy over its suppressed books. The two most obvious puzzles arising from the collection were succinctly laid out in a note added by Legman to the 1945 catalogue, in which he queried the word ‘Extracts’ preceding the first entry, and, in view of the small number of titles in the list, the extraordinarily high numbering of some of the pressmarks. As to the significance of ‘Extracts,’ I was un- able to come to any conclusions, any more than I could with the name of the collection of itself, which had been variously interpreted as being an acronym for ‘Secret Shelf’ or ‘State Secret.’ This last mystery was solved with the publication of The Library of the British Museum (London: British Library, 1991), a collection of excellent essays by various hands ably edited by P. R. Harris. In one of these essays, The Private Case: a History by Paul J. Cross, the S.S. is revealed to be an acronym for ‘Suppressed Safe’ although internally in the BL it is also known as the ‘Suppressed Cupboard.’ The meaning of ‘Extracts’ and the high pressmark num- bers are more difficult nuts to crack.

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