The Reverend William Standfast (1683-1754) was the rector of the village of Clifton, a few miles from the English midland town of Nottingham. The library he founded represents a link between the older ecclesiastical culture of the seventeenth century and the new urban civilization described in Paul Sturges's paper above and illustrates the theme of Libraries and Cultural Change.

Ten years before his death he gave "his whole study of books" to the Bluecoat Charity School in Nottingham, to be kept there as a lending library "for the use of the Clergy, Lawyers, Phicitians and other persons of a liberal and learned education" from the town or eight miles round. (Standfast's intentions are cited in John Russell's A History of the Nottingham Subscription Library [Nottingham: Derry & Sons, 1916], pp. 50-51, where the detailed rules are also quoted.) Such a library was very much in the tradition of the endowed parish libraries set up in many towns and villages in England, Wales, and Scotland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and indeed Standfast stipulated that the library should be in the care of the principal local clergymen (of the Church of England, naturally), who were to act as trustees.

As far as can be established, the library was at first little used and lay disregarded in the Bluecoat School for half a century. Then in 1816 it was taken over by the newly founded Nottingham Subscription Library. It was kept as a separate collection, and a printed catalogue was published in 1863. The catalogue lists 1,408 items, representing nearly 1,800 volumes; most dated from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but there were several incunabula and a number of later additions to Standfast's original collection. Looking at this "classified" catalogue today, it is apparent what a rich collection it was. About one-third was theology, with a particular strength in multivolume Biblical commentaries. But what makes the Standfast Library remarkable in its contents, compared with most endowed libraries of this type, is the number of medical works: 278 titles, almost twenty percent of the total number listed in the catalogue, are on medicine, and there is also a good range of other scientific literature. This is explained by William Standfast's unusual second avocation: as well as holding a B.A. from Oxford University and an M.A. from Cambridge, and serving as vicar or rector in several parishes, he took an M.B. degree at Cambridge and became a doctor of medicine in 1729. (There is no evidence about how he practiced medicine!) The bookplate illustrated is in one of Standfast's medical books: Franciscus Zypæus, Fundamenta medicinæ physico-anatomica, published in Brussels by t'Serstevens in 1683.

Most of the Standfast books were sold in the 1920s, though a few have recently been found, still on the shelves, and brought together; some of the books that remain have the manuscript inscription shown above on the back of the title page, and most have the early-nineteenth-century bookplate as well. Bromley House, the fine Georgian home of Nottingham Subscription Library, still has a room bearing Standfast's name; otherwise this library, a bridge between periods of cultural change, has almost disappeared. 

Peter Hoare

University of Nottingham