Genius Fan

The world’s largest personal library – still intact – consists of more than 9,000 volumes and fills two rooms in Abbotsford House, near Melrose, Scotland. That’s the former home of the amazing best-selling Victorian author of the Waverley novels, Sir Walter Scott. It’s delightful to approach the building, with its crenelated walls and fairytale towers – an exciting example of the Scots baronial style of architecture. Spend ten minutes in the entrance hall alone to immerse yourself in Scott’s world of storytelling, invention, myth and legend. Then it’s little more than a dozen steps until you enter his study, where he wrote so many of his novels. There’s his writing desk and chair. Look to the left and you see out into the gardens which he loved so much. Look ahead, to the right, behind and above and there are hundreds and hundreds of volumes sitting on the shelves where he put them. And for the library fantasists who dream big, there’s a narrow staircase leading to a gallery, to more shelves and to more books. If you pause and think for just a minute, you can pull out of the room a feeling of the industry, creativity and output that happened…right there, two hundred years ago. But there’s more.

Leave the study through the doorway behind Scott’s writing desk and you enter his library. The collection of books is the same as when Scott left it (he died in 1832). It hasn’t been added to and no volumes have been permanently removed. We have his descendants and then the Faculty of Advocates Abbotsford Collection Trust to thank for preserving this collection intact. You can wander this large room (listen to the excellent audio guide on little handheld devices) and get a feel for Scott’s work and his love of books and literature. The guidebook tells us the collection contains volumes going back to the Fifteenth century, on topics as broad as tree planting and demonology and from as far afield as America (sent by Washington Irving) and Germany (from the Brothers Grimm). I was looking for books written by James Boswell or Samuel Johnson. They’re there (you can search the library online, see below), but I didn’t spot them. This library will put things into perspective for you. Don’t start planning a personal library to rival Scott’s. That leads to insanity. Go home and look at your books and bookshelves and remember why you bought them.

Notes
Abbotsford. The Home of Sir Walter Scott, The Abbotsford Trust (2022)
Faculty of Advocates, Abbotsford Resources