Merton College Library

The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings and for its remarkable and important collection of manuscripts and rare books, yet a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval library down and replace it was only narrowly frustrated. This brief history of Europe’s oldest academic library traces its origins in the thirteenth century, when a new type of community of scholars was first being set up, through to the pres…