Walter de la Mare Library

The Walter de la Mare Library at Senate House Library was acquired in 2005 through the good offices of Giles de la Mare, the writer’s grandson, and the generosity of the Friends of Senate House Library. The Library consists of some 650 items used by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) as his working collection.

The Library indicates Walter de la Mare’s wide range of interests which informed his career as a poet, novelist, short story writer, anthologist and literary critic. The books cover historical and contemporary literature and also include science, history and travel, the whole giving an idea of the range of published material chosen for such a collection by a working writer of the period. The books date largely from de la Mare’s lifetime; some were gifts, and bear inscriptions from donors, often the authors. Giles de la Mare estimates that around 300 books have been annotated by Walter de la Mare himself, mostly before 1910. This lends a particular significance to the collection as a reflection of the writer’s development.

Walter de la Mare’s literary friendships are evident in the Library, for example there are several gifts of books from Edward Thomas, and annotated examples of his works such as The Icknield Way and Collected Poems for which Walter de la Mare had written the foreword.

Among the many other interesting items in the collection is a copy of The New Life of Dante Alighieri translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published in Portland, Maine by Thomas B. Mosher in 1896. The de la Mare copy is number 32 of 100 printed on Japanese vellum, and was bound in 1901 in a highly decorative leather binding by the Guild of Women Binders for ‘J.J.F’.

The collection was catalogued in 2007, and records are now available on the Library's catalogue: Walter De La Mare Library list : the catalogue records describe annotations in the works, including those by made by Walter de la Mare.

 

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