Boots Booklovers Library
Author: Debra Found
Date Published: Jul 27th 2011, 5:57pm
A few years ago a friend gave me some books which had been her Uncle's. They were ex library but not of the kind that I was used to. They were all Boots Library & they had a Boots library crest on the front cover & a hole at the top of the spine. This mystified me as I was used to the regular, council run libraries that we know today. Boots is a chemist!
I posted a query about this on a forum that I use & was astonished to learn that Boots had, indeed, been a private lending library in the days before there were council run libraries. In fact several people talked about their own personal memories of certain branches which quite amazed me. A world about which I knew nothing.
Several large stores had commercial libraries the most popular of which were Harrods & W.H. Smith. The idea of a commercial library had begun in the 18th century & continued through to the 1960s.
Boots Booklovers Library was started in 1898 by Florence Boot, the wife of Jesse Boot of Boots the Chemist. She was greatly interested in art & literature. By 1938 they were issuing 35 million books a year, nationwide. Initially they were filled with second hand stock & only in the stores that sold stationery but this rapidly expanded with new & up to date stock bought regularly. The libraries were placed at the back or upstairs of the chemists so that people had to go through the shop to get to the library. Ithis encouraged more middle class shoppers as well as customer loyalty. The reasoning behind this was not that different to the reasons behind some of the marketing ploys used by today's big shops.
By 1903, 143 of the 300 Boots shops had a library. You could pay a yearly subscription of 10/6 for one book at a time or 42/- for 6 & 7/- for each extra volume. Alternatively you could pay as you read , leaving a deposit of 2/6 & paying per day that you borrowed the book – the price depending on the category of book; the most popular being the more expensive. The cleanliness of the books was a key point in advertising – makes you wonder what state the books were in from other commercial libraries. The major city branches had desks & chairs as well as notepaper & flowers. The extra services available included reservations, much like today, & also the ability to leave a wish list & the books to be reserved when they came in. There were all sorts of additional memberships for holiday periods only, juniors & arrangements for those in the country. Boots also had library sales to sell off the older & less popular books. The shield on the front cover was crossed through when the books were sold.
Books could be borrowed from any branch & returned to any branch. A green shield in the window of the store indicated that it was a branch with a library. The books were bound specifically for Boots with a green Boots shield on the front & a hole in the top of the spine. The hole was for placing the borrowers tag through, which served a similar purpose to a library card.
During the Second World War there were more than 1 million subscribers & Boots were buying books at the rate of 1,250,000 a year. This was a real heyday for the library. According to records the Whodunnits & light romances were the most popular; nothing has changed there then!
In the 1960's the libraries started to be phased out. Paperbacks were becoming cheaper & council run libraries were starting to emerge. There was also pressure to use the shop space for more profitable purposes. The last branch closed in February 1966.
These libraries were such a part of daily life that it featured in the film “Brief Encounter” when Celia Johnson made her weekly visit to the Boots Library.
In the 1920's Jesse Boot donated a large sum of money to the University of Nottingham. In memory of this the university opened it's own Boots Library on campus in 1998. The Boots Lending Library lives on.........