OVER the course of his life, John Addington Symonds assembled the working library that supported his wide-ranging research and writing. That library became even more important upon his definitive relocation in 1880 to Davos, Switzerland, where the collection continued to grow through purchases and gifts, most of which arrived via international post. As Van Wyck Brooks observes in his 1914 John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study, “Symonds had no continuous access to any libraries but his own” after his move to Davos (139), though the ensuing period would be by far his most productive.
Most of Symonds’s books were dispersed after his death in 1893. Nevertheless, his library’s contents can partly be determined from a variety of evidence, such as mentions in his letters or Memoirs, photographs of his study, citations in his works, and book sales and auctions after his death. In a few cases, his actual copies, sometimes bearing his armorial bookplate (image below) or other ownership marks, can be tracked down today in libraries and private collections. Using these and other sources, JASP is reconstructing the library’s contents.
There are three ways to consult the Lost Library from this site:
- The Lost Library List provides a complete list of books we have traced to Symonds, with basic bibliographic details and links to scans of the same works in the same editions in Hathi Trust (when available). It is generated automatically on this site from our Group Library in Zotero (see below).
- The Lost Library Collection in HathiTrust allows users to browse those same scans and to perform keyword searches across the entire collection.
- The Lost Library Group Library in Zotero is the basis of the List but includes additional information (as attached notes) about the evidence that has enabled us to trace each item to Symonds.
