Keeping Everything Forever:  The Stationers' Company and Legal Deposit

Keeping Everything Forever: The Stationers’ Company and Legal Deposit

On 12 December 1610, the Master of the Stationers’ Company, Thomas Man, reached an agreement with Sir Thomas Bodley to supply Oxford’s Bodleian Library with a free copy of every book registered at Stationers’ Hall. This agreement became the founding document of what we now call legal deposit – the reason Sir Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library, says that wherever he travels in the world, everyone knows that the BL “collects everything”.

Since then, selected British libraries have collected every book, pamphlet and music score published in the United Kingdom. From esoteric monographs to incendiary tracts, from revered classics to erased literatures waiting to be rediscovered, legal deposit has preserved these works without favour or prejudice, allowing us to explore and interrogate the evolution of ideas in print.

This exhibition brings together a selection of images to support our Archive Evening, and highlight the wealth of material available for research at the Stationers’ Company Archive. Click on the images to find out more. Text draws on information in the Stationers’ Company Archive, and on material in the bibliography below.