Month: July 2026

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some much-needed and long-delayed holiday time with my girlfriend this week!  I had booked two rooms in the Holiday Inn Express in Shrewsbury, England, mainly because it had air-conditioning.  As is often the case with this chain, the air-conditioning proved to be excellent in the rooms, and it nicely tempered the searing heat.  I was truly grateful that I had not booked a cottage!

From the car park at the front of the hotel, the view was dominated by the mass of the Wrekin hill, which loomed over the landscape.  The mornings were spent in visits to friends who had moved to the area – house-prices are relatively low – and the afternoons were spent flat on our beds, recovering.

I had noted that the Roman city of Wroxeter, ancient Viriconium, was about 5 miles away from the hotel, down a lane, and to it I duly went one afternoon.  The massive wall of the bath-house is the dominating feature of the site.

The opening in the middle originally featured a pair of massive doors, which led into the frigidarium.  This wall was the main entrance to the baths, and was constructed more substantially, which is perhaps why it has survived.  The hypocausts for the hot room are well-preserved also.

Almost as interesting on that afternoon was the discovery that the site shop had a freezer.  In this resided a number of flavours of ice-cream, including a “magnum”.  This ice-cream accompanied me as I walked around the site.

The weather was too hot to do much with Shrewsbury itself, and the lack of air-conditioning in shops was remarkable.  The result was that my visit  to the town was quickly cut short.  But I think that I will return, and explore further.

More digitizations at Google Books?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting email has reached me, noticing that work seems to have resumed at Google Books:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but Google Books has been adding new material this year from a number of university libraries that have entered their partnership program. As could be expected, the [most likely] reason is that they are desperate to get more printed material to train their LLMs, and libraries are happy if big corporations put up the money and resources to scan their collections. Here’s a very recent article about digitization at Delaware University.

Lately I have seen many books I couldn’t find before with digitization date from around [last April], from Oxford and other places….

This seems entirely plausible, and also good news in a way.

It’s been known for a while that some AI companies are scanning books.  An “AI” system seems to be basically a search engine with a chatbot on the front, which is why Google panicked when AI came along.  It’s the same market.  Naturally the search engine has to be populated somehow.  They call it “training an LLM”, in order to obfusticate the violations of copyright, but in truth it seems to be something as simple as populating the database or “model” with the data to be searched.  In this case, all the books in the world.

I’d rather have access to the books than whatever an AI engine spits out of them, tho.

A curious story: the 1972 sales of the library of the King’s Inns, Dublin.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 1597 edition of the Opera Omnia of Tertullian, edited by Franciscus Junius, is one of the rarer early editions.  A few days ago, I learned that there was a copy at the Tresoar library in Frisia, in the Netherlands, shelf-mark “F 1532”.  The volume has a clear stamp showing that at one point it belonged the library of the King’s Inns, in Dublin.

The four Inns of Court in London are professional associations, which every barrister must join in order to practice, and which provide various facilities for the legal profession.  But Dublin did and does possess its own inn of court, the King’s Inns, which fulfils a similar role in the Irish legal system.  This was established in 1541, and is an important part of the cultural heritage of Ireland.  In particular it built up a valuable general library of antiquarian books and maps, including incunables, only a portion of which were related to the law.  But much of it was of crucial importance for Irish heritage and cultural identity.  Often the book was the only copy in the country, in some cases almost the only copy known to exist.

In 1971, however, something strange happened.  The King’s Inns was in serious financial difficulty.  This had been made worse by spending significant sums on its catering arrangements.  The ruling council of King’s Inns, the “benchers”, had to do something.  So what they decided to do was to sell those books in the library which were not related to the law, books “under the classification of scientific, religious and geographical.”

As news of the proposed sale drifted out into the library community in Ireland, concerns began to appear, and increasing numbers of questions were asked.  Scenting trouble, the then Irish Prime Minister obtained a promise from the benchers not to sell books which contained “any reference to Ireland.” 1  The barristers themselves began to ask questions about what was happening.  But Sotheby’s were instructed, and duly proceeded to remove all the books.  Shockingly it seems that the benchers did not even pay very much attention to just which books were removed.  A short hand list existed of a few hundred volumes, but this was only a fraction of what was removed:

It is clear that, as the van from Sotheby’s drove down Henrietta Street laden with some 7,000 volumes comprising almost three thousand titles, nobody at King’s Inns knew exactly which books had gone from the society’s library. Not even Sotheby’s had a list.2

Inevitably this meant that a number of valuable legal books were also taken, as well as books clearly of cultural importance.  Around 90,000 volumes were left, about 50% of which are non-legal.

Despite frantic attempts by Irish libraries to rescue at least some of the books, this collection was disposed of in 1972 in three sales, raising a total of £138,975 for the King’s Inns, plus a commission of approximately £24,000 going to Sothebys. 3  In modern money this would be approximately £2.38m and £411k.  In these days, when the expenditure of a few million pounds is almost petty cash, the income from the sale seems very paltry compared to the damage that it did to Ireland. 4

Title page of the Sothebys catalogue of the King’s Inns sale, 20 November 1972.
  1. Kenny, p.54.[↩]
  2. Kenny, p.62.[↩]
  3. Kenny, p.137.[↩]
  4. For many more details, see Colum Kenny, King’s Inns and the Battle of the Books, 1972: Cultural Controversy at a Dublin Library (2002).[↩]