Preserving Lloyd’s Register’s rare maritime books & library

The Heritage Centre regularly assess the condition of it’s archives and library books for external conservation. Just over a year ago, 14 books were selected to undergo interventive conservation due to their poor and fragile condition. 

The books selected included the oldest volume in our collection (William Camden, The History of the most renowned and victorious Princess Elizabeth, 1688), several books on naval architecture and ship building (including: Frederick Henry de Chapman, A treatise on ship-building,1820 and The shipbuilder's assistant or, some essays towards compleating the art of marine architecture,1711) and two volumes displaying hand painted coastal maps and engraved charts for pilotage (Grenville Collins, Great Britain's Coasting pilot, by, 1756 and Sieur Bougard J T Serres, The little sea torch or true guide for coasting pilots, translated, 1801). 

Lloyd’s Register (LR) has had a library for over 170 years, it originates with a bequeath from the then Principal Surveyor, Augustin Francis Bullock Creuze, in 1852. Creuze was a successful author on naval architecture, having trained in Portsmouth in his youth, he had a collection of over 30 volumes on shipbuilding, naval architecture and voyages around the world and edited at least 7 books himself. 

Some of the books conserved were part of this original library, they contain inscriptions and marginalia that make them identifiable as Creuze’s collection.  This collection of books grew over the years, and we now have a library of over 60,000 books. When the architect (Thomas E Collcutt) was designing LR’s office in London the late 19th century he included a design for a new library, this was an L-shaped room with a vaulted ceilings, bearing stencil paintings of the major shipbuilding ports in the UK and stained glass designed by Shrigley and Hunt. This room forms part of the listed spaces in the Lloyd’s Register Building, and as part of a refurbishment project more bespoke library shelving and reading rooms have been added to the public library. 

The definition of a rare book/special collection is a fairly vague one. It usually encompasses books made before the mass machine printing method, sometimes excluding books which were produced after 1800’s, which used these methods. However, the rarity, or special nature, of the book could be defined by other factors which include its scarcity, the edition or publication run, marginalia or inscriptions which make the volume unique, it’s value to a collection or institution or it’s availability. The provenance of a book also plays a part in its definition as rare book or part of a special collection, provenance relates to the history of ownership of an object and helps to detail the journey a book has made. 

Using the collection of books which started the LR Library as an example, we can trace the provenance through the inscriptions in the books that show they were owned by Creuze, or we could check if a full list was recorded in minute books, correspondence or any other archival records that we hold. In this instance, a full list was never recorded in the archival records, but the inscriptions help to identify the previous owners and their journey to the form the LR Library.  

Because of this, some volumes considered “rare” might not actually be rare to find and there may be copies at multiple places. Several of the books that were conserved are also held at other libraries, some also in London not far from our own library. But the institutional value and relevance will differ, and those that formed part of LR’s initial library are a part of the story of our 170 plus years collecting and caring for books. 

The decision to seek interventive conservation for rare books is always the choice of the owner/custodian of the book in question. We also seek preventive conservation methods before doing anything to directly to collections, but some objects are so badly damaged or fragile that little can be done to help increase their accessibility. When deciding what kind of interventive conservation is needed, some prefer to have all their collections looking as aesthetically pleasing as possible, whilst others prefer a more conservative approach and prefer the books to retain as much as their original binding. There are arguments for both, however we decided to go down the latter route and requested that as much as the original bindings be kept as possible. Even the defects tell a story about a book or record. 

That being said, some of the volumes that were conserved were completely inaccessible by researchers or by staff, their condition was so poor that any handling of them would have resulted in further damage. 

The above images show two books that were sent to the conservators. The book on the left contains handwriting exercises by a previous owner (William Gibson) and includes a poem that reads “ William Gibson is my name, and England is my nation, Scarborough is dwelling place and heaven I hope will be my habitation”. Alongside this poetic embellishment of the book are some less artistic sketches of ships and people, it is these inscriptions which make this particular book all the more interesting. 

Before being sent to the conservators this books’ (Marine architecture or directions for carrying on a ship, 1736) front and back cover boards were loose and detached, with several leaves (or pages) also coming loose. The pages also contained lots of dirt and some pages were torn and badly damaged. The book was inaccessible to researchers and couldn’t be viewed internally without causing further damage so it was a prime candidate for conservation. 

As the above images show, the books are now in a much better condition. Much of the original binding has been saved, and for the few examples which were completely rebound, they were done so replicating the original binding. The book on the right (Camden, History of the Princess Elizabeth, 1688) was completely rebound as the whole binding was split in two. 

These books can now be accessed safely without risk of further damage, we aim to have some of them on display in our refurbished Heritage Centre and we will be continuing to catalogue them and make them more searchable by linking them to the English Short Title Catalogue and other databases.