Priceless Jeremy Bentham books found at UCL

Rare books from a priceless collection owned by UCL’s intellectual inspiration, Jeremy Bentham, have been found in UCL’s libraries and archives.

The existence of the collection was long known about, but a chance conversation between two university staff at a conference two years ago has helped unearth a list of the volumes in it.

The bequest was much larger than had been anticipated – 4,500 books with some dating back to the 16th century. Crucially, many of the volumes contain notes made by Bentham in the margins which may shed light on his thinking.

In his will, Bentham left the majority of his book collection to the London University, as UCL used to be called. A conversation between UCL’s Head of Records Colin Penman and Dr Tim Causer, Principal Research Fellow at the Bentham Project in the Faculty of Laws, helped to shed light on the collection’s remarkable size and whereabouts. The process of tracking the books down has been painstaking. Most of the books bequeathed by Bentham ended up on the shelves of UCL’s library, their history forgotten about. Later, many made their way into the university’s rare book collections, where they were dispersed amongst several individual collections.

Following work by Laws and LCCOS staff to correlate book accession registers and the library catalogue, dozens of volumes have been found so far.

Volumes found so far include The Union of the two noble and Illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke by Richard Grafton (1548), The Last Volume of the Chronicles of England and Ireland by Richard Holinshed (1577) and – the oldest one in the bequest – The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde by Sebastien Brandt, translated by Alexander Barclay (1509).

Erika Delbecque, Head of Rare Books at UCL Special Collections, who is overseeing Ms Evans’s work, said:

“It is a hugely significant collection for UCL because Bentham is so closely related to the history of the university. To have part of his original library that we no longer knew we had is a really exciting discovery.”

For more information, see UCL News.