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Where the books were written, set, sold, printed and buried: from the Globe to the graves, the bookshops to the presses.
This season's book talks, festivals and exhibitions are in What's On: Books & writers
The library founded in 1933 in Clerkenwell's radical schoolhouse, where Lenin edited Iskra and a 1935 fresco covers the wall.
Libraries & archivesGo inside
Also in Power & Politics and The World in London.
The building was the Welsh Charity School of 1738; the London Patriotic Club took it in 1872, the Twentieth Century Press printed socialist papers here, and in 1902 and 1903 Lenin edited the exile paper Iskra from a small back office that is kept as he left it. The library opened in 1933, the year of the Nazi book-burnings, on the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death, and holds the working-class movement's books and archives, above all the papers of the British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Jack Hastings painted the fresco in the reading room in 1935, a worker clearing away the chaos of capitalism, with Marx, Lenin and Morris looking on.
Tuesday to Thursday 11:00–16:00 by appointment; tours Mondays at 12:00 and Thursdays at 16:00
Tours £10, £5 concessions, not during the summer closure. Email a week ahead to use the reading room.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.