“The handsome house in the corner of St James’s Square, which now has 8,000 members and one million books, has for the past 160 years been the best ‘place on the civilised earth’, but it no longer caters for those who are ‘not rich’. Carlyle’s insistence that readers pay only a ‘small annual sum’ has seemingly been forgotten, and the annual fee is to rise by nearly 80 per cent to £375.”

The London Library