The languages of the library

As the librarian of the RCP's heritage library, it's not uncommon for people to ask me what language all the books in the library are written in. Until recently, I haven't had any hard data on which to base my answer – only  my perceptions based on browsing the shelves, fetching books for researchers, and pursuing my own areas of interest. Obviously these methods aren't statistically sound, so my answers were usually pretty vague: 'A lot of Latin, a lot of English, and quite a few other languages thrown in, too.'

Now, thanks to completion of phase one of a long-term cataloguing project, I'm able to reply in more detail. A lot more detail.

Over the last several years, library staff supported by volunteer Yvonne Lee have picked away at the unglamorous but useful task working out what language every book we hold is written in.

The library catalogue contains a record of every book the library owns, and lots of information about it: its title, when it was printed, who wrote it and what it’s about. However, a lot of the records are very brief, and don’t necessarily contain all the information you might want about a book – like what language(s) it’s written in.

When we started the project to improve this, we found that only 37% of the books published before the year 1900 had any language information attached: that’s just 9,503 books out of a total of over 25,000 from this date range in the Heritage Library.

That means that we’ve worked through 16,347 catalogue records assigning one or more languages to them. Library cataloguing rules mean that we’re only interested in the predominant language(s) of a book – we don’t have to check every page to see if there’s a single quotation from a different language, we just have to represent the main language or languages of the bulk of the text. But that’s not always so straightforward, when you consider that there was for some time a fashion for including Latin and Greek in the title of books actually written in English. A great example is Robert Lovell’s 1661 Πανζωορυκτολογια [Panzōoryktologia], sive Panzoologicomineralogia, or A compleat history of animals and minerals. It has both Greek and Latin at the start of its title, but is really all written in English.

So now that we have all these records updated (as far as language is concerned at least – there’s much more work we could be doing on our historical catalogue records to make them more useful), we can analyse which languages are present in the collection, and when.

Here’s the overall league table:

Over half the books are written in English, and 84% are in either English or Latin. 207 books, about 1% of the whole, are written in more than one language. They’ve been grouped together in the table, but actually contain a variety of combinations of up to 9 different languages. At the other end of the spectrum, there are 11 languages represented by fewer than 10 books each.

To some extent, the linguistic variety in its library was replicated elsewhere in RCP policy. The college long expected candidates taking its exams to be competent in more than one language: there was compulsory translation of Greek and Latin medical excerpts until 1924, with translation from French or German continuing until 1963.

English is the second language by 1699, and then moves clearly into first place in the 18th century, and is just over three quarters of the titles in the 19th century.

French is the next most common language after English, but German starts to grow in the period 1700-1799, and then has a decent chunk from 1800-1899. This likely reflects the growing importance of the work of German scientists in the developing fields of chemistry, biology and microbiology in these time periods. It will be interesting to analyse the subject information for these books across time – just as soon as we’ve finished adding subject tags to everything in the catalogue!

Other Arabic books were acquired later from donors including Grace Pierrepont, Gavin Milroy, Alice Chalmers and Roy Dobbin.

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It’s been intriguing and exciting to be able to use the language data to dig into some aspects of the history of the RCP library. As ongoing cataloguing projects progress, we’ll be able to examine other areas such as subject coverage and means of acquisition in a similar manner. 

Katie Birkwood, rare books and special collections librarian

The exhibition ‘A body of knowledge: 500 years of book collecting at the Royal College of Physicians’ runs until 23 July 2026, and includes books written in 11 different languages.