from The Accidental Curator

#7 Gangsters and prisoners

Books in padded envelopes, parcels bound in string and cardboard boxes with crumpled corners arrived daily at the British Library’s loading bay in 2 Sheraton Street, in the heart of Soho. Like the secret transfers of truckloads of liquor during the days of Prohibition, these consignments were placed into crate after crate and then onto robust trollies. Staff as careful as gangsters – by which I mean very careful – portered the crates to The Copyright Receipt Office where each package was opened, the books inspected and a receipt generated and posted off to its publisher or distributor. The books were sorted alphabetically by imprint and then the porters returned: the crates were carried up several floors and distributed to the centre of each of three open plan offices. There a large cataloguing workforce – Teams A, B, and C – would be ready to process them further.

I was assigned to Team C and, with the tone of one of those decorated mugs which read ‘You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here But It Helps’, welcomed warmly by my new colleagues. Which team got to catalogue which books was worked out by the alphabet. Team C received books from publishers whose name began with a letter in the last third or so of the alphabet (there will have been occasional checks over time to see if it was still an efficient distribution).

You can see that the alphabet really was a favourite ordering system in the job – don’t ...