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It worked in The Waste Land<\/em>. But it made work in the British Museum nearly impossible for a young T. S. Eliot.<\/p>\n For no sooner had he settled at his desk each Saturday afternoon than, \u2018there sounded the familiar warning\u2019: \u2018\u2019Hurry up please, it\u2019s time\u2019. Employed at Lloyds bank, Eliot had only a few precious hours at the weekend for his writing. And by 1918, he\u2019d had enough. So, like many great writers before him and since, T. S. Eliot joined the London Library. He would remain an active member for the rest of his life, serving as President from 1952 until his death in 1965 (during which time one Sir Winston Churchill served as Vice President under him).<\/p>\n It would prove to be an extremely productive place for Eliot down the years, and not just because of the lack of tannoy announcements. The London Library\u2019s idiosyncratic shelving system \u2013 where \u2018Insanity\u2019 leads to \u2018Inns of Court\u2019 and \u2018Football\u2019 is followed by \u2018Fools\u2019 \u2013 was an unending source of delight for such a voracious, allusive and kaleidoscopic imagination as Eliot\u2019s.<\/p>\n The air of productive calm (set off against the bustle of central London), combined with the ability to \u2018take ten volumes home with me\u2019 from the open shelving meant that for Eliot, \u2018without the London Library, many of my early essays could never have been written\u2019. Eliot recognised it as a place that fires the imagination and cultivates the soul, a place of curious books and even more curious people.<\/p>\n It was something he went out of his way to protect, donating handwritten manuscripts of The Waste Land<\/em> to Library auctions and even appearing in court as a star witness when the library was under threat in the 1950s, despite troubles with his false teeth \u2018which did not allow him to eat raspberries in public\u2019. Eliot was unyielding: \u2018the disappearance of the London Library would be a disaster to civilisation\u2019, let alone his own writing.<\/p>\n So if, like T. S. Eliot you are thinking of joining the London Library, and following in the footsteps of the likes of Lord Alfred Tennyson, Virginia Woolf or Hannah Sullivan \u2013 much of whose T. S. Eliot prize-winning collection Three Poems <\/em>was written in the library \u2013 then the message is clear: \u2018Hurry up please, it\u2019s time\u2019.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Eliot3-1-scaled.jpg\")
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