The first comprehensive history of a world-renowned repository of knowledge and scholarship, this volume deals primarily with the growth of the library's collections, their cataloguing, and the reading rooms in which they are housed. The appendices includes a list of some of the better known persons who have used the reading rooms. 100 illustrations.

In this first volume of the 1877 work that established him as England's leading authority on pornography, Henry Spencer Ashbee describes scores of "curious, uncommon and erotic books" that were banned or otherwise prohibited from legitimate sale during the Victorian era... and some even until the 1960s. Included in this far-reaching volume are such "gentlemen only" titles as Exhibition of Female Flagellants, The Battles of Venus, and A Cabinet of Amorous Curiosities. This catalog of mostly forgotten works is an invaluable-and highly entertaining-resource for bibliophiles, students of erotica, and collectors of Victoriana. British book collector, travel writer, and bibliographer HENRY SPENCER ASHBEE (1834-1900), aka Pisanus Fraxi, is thought by some to have authored the notorious Victorian sexual memoir My Secret Life.