History of the Town Library
scarcely been enough to accommodate the librarians' ambitions properly. Most of the Town Library's original stock was Victorian, and it seemed appropriate to complement it with modern works on that era, particularly its art and architecture, natural history and social history, which in large measure are matched by the older holdings. With funds belonging to the Town Library itself many items have been purchased, and between 600 and 800 are added each year. Books on Victorian themes have been transferred to Saffron Walden from elsewhere in the Essex County Library service, often at the end of their most active shelf-life, so that the Town Library has become a lodgement for much of Essex's reserve stock of Victorian literary and political biographies. In these ways about 5,000 modern works on nineteenth-century topics have been added to the 14,000 acquired during the Town Library's independent existence. The library also subscribes to over 80 periodicals, most of them concerned with Victorian literature, history and art and architecture, and spends about £7,000 a year on rebinding the inherited volumes, whose often sumptuous bindings have been worn by six generations of readers. The Town Library's astonishingly rich and varied holdings reflect the diverse and abundant culture of the Victorian community and
the enlightened foresight of the County Library, which has enhanced its legacy by subtle and imaginative acquisitions.
Most of the 2,000 enquiries that are made at the Victorian Studies Centre each year concern the history of north-west Essex, and it is natural to comment first on the library as a resource for the local historian. It has 2,000 items on Essex, including the standard county histories but consisting for the most part of material on Saffron Walden and the villages near it. Like much of the Town Library's stock, it may be consulted but not borrowed, a limitation natural enough, but one that should force consideration of how much readers' space the library might need if its riches were as widely known as they deserve. Much of the local material was collected a century or more ago by the Literary and Scientific Institution as it was published. In other Victorian towns a variety of agencies built up local collections in a similar fashion and often their acquisitions are now placed in the public library. But Saffron Walden is unusual, to say the least, in preserving its local collection in its first proper home and among books of a quite different character: not the least of the library's offerings to historians is the picture of
