Christ Church Library

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The New Library of Christ Church, Oxford, located in Peckwater Quadrangle, was started in 1717 and completed in 1772.

The library was intended to match the great classical libraries of Trinity College, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin, and to attract aristocratic students to Christ Church. The building was probably designed by Dr George Clarke of All Souls, and the master mason was William Townsend (1668?–1739). The books were placed at first floor level to avoid damp and flooding. The ground floor was originally intended to be an open loggia, but while the building was still under construction, Christ Church was given a large collection of pictures. To accommodate this bequest, the open arches of the ground floor were converted into windows, the ground was floored, and the space became, until 1963, a Picture Gallery.

[edit] Old Library

The first Christ Church Library opened in 1562, and was housed in the former refectory of St Frideswide's Priory. It was fitted with wooden lecterns bought second-hand from the derelict medieval University Library. The books were chained to the lecterns: most were large Latin folios on theology and patristics, imported from the Continent but bound in Oxford — a 1534 statute had prohibited the importation of bound books.^[1] About 140 of the original volumes are still held in the New Library.

[edit] Contents

Christ Church Library contains what is probably the largest and richest collection of early printed books and manuscripts in Oxford after the Bodleian Library. Despite ongoing archiving and addition to OLIS, the Oxford University Library System, the size of the old collections have never been accurately established, but could be anything up to 100,000 books printed before 1801.