The Library of John Locke

In 1965 John Harrison and Peter Laslett published The Library of John Locke (2nd edition, 1971), a superlative service to scholarship. However, scholarship moves on, and an entire subdiscipline of the history of the book has since emerged. Furthermore, Harrison and Laslett’s book arguably offered an unsatisfactory hybrid, being neither quite an edition of Locke’s own catalogues nor an autonomous scholarly catalogue of books which Locke owned.

A new version would, inter alia, provide fuller bibliographic descriptions, and identify all annotations and present locations. One model is Nicolas Kiessling’s edition of Anthony Wood’s library (2002). Ideally, the new project would also capture all works cited in Locke’s publications, journals, notebooks, and correspondence, and thereby provide a comprehensive inventory of Locke in the world of print.

Dr Felix Waldmann has embarked on this as a long-term project. He has published some preliminary findings in ‘The Library of John Locke: Additions, Corrigenda, and a Conspectus of Pressmarks’, Bodleian Library Record, 26 (2013), 36-58.

Such a project would need to be published in electronic form, both for public access and to allow for continuing augmentation. We believe, however, that there would remain scope for print publication as well. While the Editorial Board of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke does not include the project within its formal remit, it has given its strong encouragement to it.

Locke scholars are invited to offer thoughts and suggestions concerning the project, and, in particular, to send information to Dr Waldmann about the present locations of any of Locke’s books not mentioned in The Library of John Locke or in Dr Waldmann’s article, whether in libraries, private collections, or auction catalogues.

Mark Goldie (mag1010@cam.ac.uk)
J. R. Milton (john.milton@kcl.ac.uk)
Felix Waldmann (few23@cam.ac.uk)