Royal
Elmbridge
Libraries Canada

Under the Treaty of Troyes, Henry V of England legislated the condition that each nation, France and England, catalogue the entire collections of their royal libraries.  Moreover, an appendant document, the Charte Impérial de la Bilbiothèque, laid out provisions of exchange and duplication whose ultimate aim was to ensure that the royal holdings of the libraries of Britain and France be paired.  To effect this massive undertaking, the individual holdings of the Bibliothèque Royale de France and British Royal Library required cataloguing. Sadly, the King's death in 1422 delayed the execution of this noble work until his son reached majority.

Taking up the reins left by his father, Henry VI  dispatched to Paris the eminent bibliologist John Snotch, creating him Viscount Aggerleigh and royal librarian. Having charged the new Viscount with cataloguing the French collection, Henry VI retired in the late summer of 1446 to his country estate in Shropshire, where the Viscount joined him when Joan of Arc's army threatened Paris.  In Elmbridge House, Henry VI held a rather impressive collection of books, including many classics of stoic peritecticism.  There, among the flowering elms, and beside the softly flowing Severn River, over which spanned the mighty Ruckland Bridge, the King spent many hours reading classics.  These bucolic environs also helped him strike upon a name for his novel cataloguing project, the ‘Royal Elmbridge.’ Upon the end of the Hundred Years' War, the French connection was renewed, and throughout the succeeding centuries, eminent French and English scholars regularly crossed the Channel to confer and catalogue.

The Royal Elmbridge mission was frequently mortally imperiled by the vicissitudes of history. From the murder of the Viscount’s nephew St. Clair Snotch in the Grand Reading Room to the seven Luftwaffe pilots who parachuted through the skylights of the South Wing during the Battle of Britain, the forces of chaos assailed and assaulted what playful scholars call ‘The R.E.’ with distressing frequency and severity. The King’s Press (one of the first in Britain, personally christened by Caxton) was burned during the Wars of the Roses, the French holding library was sacked by iconoclastic revolutionaries in 1792, three British sub-curators were imprisoned by Napoleon... and yet, Elmbridge endured. Through a history rife with peril, countless editions of our precious titles have seen the light of day; and across centuries, and through the gentlest, guiding hands of high British and French nobility, the R.E. has only risen in stature.  Today, it is no longer a comprehensive holding, but rather a prized selection of the British and French National Libraries, jointly determined by the most eminent scholars and national and royal librarians.  It is considered to be as prestigious a distinction to the included authors as the most esteemed literary prizes, such as the Booker, Pulitzer, and Nobel Prizes.  To you, we extend the privilege of pre-ordering from a selection of this year’s finest literature, as chosen by royal librarians of the British and French National Libraries.