In 1927 the British Federation of University Women (BFUW) set up Crosby Hall as a Hall of Residence where women graduates from overseas could stay while studying in or visiting London. It was part of the Federation’s aim to foster international understanding and peace at a time of social and political turmoil. Immediately a Library Committee of well known women such as Alys Russell (ex wife of Bertrand Russell) and Caroline Spurgeon (a literary critic) set up a library at the Hall which by 1960 was known as the ‘Sybil Campbell Library Collection’. Books were donated by friends of these well connected women (Leonard Woolf and Lady Astor were particularly generous), by those visiting the Hall and some were purchased within a limited budget. Accessions were therefore on a somewhat ad hoc basis and provide an intriguing historical source. Crosby Hall has long since been sold, but the library travelled first to Bloomsbury and ultimately to the Special Collections of the University of Winchester. It travelled accompanied by an eclectic archive of library minutes, assorted correspondence and three cardboard boxes of ephemera. One of the largest sections of the Library is a collection on London itself, especially Chelsea where the Hall was located.

The paper draws on Carolyn Steedman’s Dust in analysing the sensory power of a book collection for the historian. Is it more than the sum of its parts? Why are the trustees and the university so adamant that the collection holds more meaning if it is held separately rather than integrated onto the general shelves? This paper reflects on the possibilities inherent in research on a collection such as this, rather than focusing on the content of the books contained in the Library. In response to the conference theme it focuses on the London section and discusses the London that would have been presented to the new arrivals to the Hall through the books of the library. What impression of the Capital did the benefactors wish their newly arrived readers to take away with them? What are the possibilities for the researcher into women’s formal and informal education in this Collection? Who donated them?  Whose London do they reflect? Were they intended to educate or entertain academic visitors? The state of the book itself might indicate how much it was read – or even how much of it was read. The books display traces of a nomadic life – from the libraries of literary giants of the mid twentieth century displayed through book plates, to careful cataloguing and re-listing numbers.  In theorising the significance of place and space in terms of inanimate objects the paper also discusses the meaning of the movement of the books themselves – did ‘the library’ gather or lose meaning as it was disengaged from its original grandiose context and moved from basement to basement gathering dust?

Steedman, C. (2002) Dust, Manchester University Press McDowell, L. (1998) Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Cambridge: Polity Rubinstein, V. (2007) The Story of the Sybil Campbell Library Collection and the Principles that Determined its Content, Sybil Campbell Monograph Series