About eight years ago, I inherited a small, paper-covered book. Pasted to its front cover is a label: ‘LIBRARY LIST’. Printed by F J Ward, ‘Bookseller and Printseller, 3 Baker Street, London, W1’, it is a ‘record of books read or recommended’. Inside, in neat pencil, sometimes fountain pen, is a list of authors and titles, and a set of wry notes: ‘Medium – a little boring’; or ‘Funny – satirical – lewd’. On the flyleaf, in the same tidy hand, it is dated ‘1937–41’. The book belonged to my great-grandmother Margaret Amy Pyke. Over four years, she recorded more than four hundred titles – 411, to be exact. The first is H G Wells’s 1936 novella The Croquet Player; the last, the second volume of popular novelist Howard Spring’s autobiography, In the Meantime. In addition, Margaret noted ‘by whom’ a particular book was ‘reviewed or recommended’ in the column provided: ‘S.T.’ for the Sunday Times, ‘Obs.’, The Observer, ‘T&T’, Time and Tide. 

What emerges from the list is an account not just of Margaret’s reading habits – she was particularly fond of crime fiction – but also of good intentions gone astray. Someone called ‘Rosie’ suggested a whole stack of titles in early September 1937, most of which remained unread. There are more idiosyncratic annotations too – a little inked or pencilled ‘v’, like a hastily drawn bird; one small ‘o’ inside another, a kind of marginal fried egg. What the individual marks mean is something I’m still deciphering, like the list itself, which I slowly transcribed into a spreadsheet during a fellowship at Cambridge University Library. 

Visitors to the library might be familiar with the catalogue hall that leads to the main reading room, flanked with cases filled with large green tomes. This is the original catalogue, now online. Turn the corner and you find yourself in a corridor lined on one side with metal cabinets,