This journal collects reading notes, new-acquisition lists and archive material from a working lending library. The aim is simple: keep a public record of what arrives on the shelves, what is worth reading, and which writers keep pulling readers back years after publication.

What you will find here

Four strands run through the archive. Library & Archive holds the house material — monthly new-book lists, exhibition notes, the young writers programme and the building’s own history. Book Reviews gathers longer reading notes on individual titles and pairs of titles, written the way one reader talks to another rather than the way a catalogue describes a product. Authors & Poets profiles the writers whose work circulates most, with attention to biography, subject matter and the books worth starting with. Reading Lists pulls the strands together into practical selections.

How the reading notes are written

Each note starts from a finished reading, not a summary of a summary. Where a book fails, the note says so. Where a translation matters, the translator is named. Plot description stays light enough that a first reading is not spoiled, and quotations are kept short and attributed.

Coverage and gaps

The archive leans literary — fiction, memoir, essays, poetry — with regular excursions into history and popular science when a title earns the space. Genre fiction appears when it is unusually good. The gaps are honest gaps: a library journal reflects what a particular collection buys and what its readers ask for, not the whole of publishing.

Corrections

Facts in the archive — publication years, translators, prize records, biographical dates — are checked against the books themselves and against the library catalogue. Where an error survives that process, the correction is made in place rather than quietly deleted.