Richard Ovenden, OBE

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227 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 6 Feb

Richard Ovenden, OBE’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Secret Life of Books · Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

Thank you.

It's a great pleasure to be on the show.

I'm delighted.

So the Bodleian is a research library.

It was founded, formally opened in 1602 as the research library of the University of Oxford.

So the first few hundred years of its existence was really for senior scholars or graduate students.

It wasn't really a place that undergraduates engaged with until actually relatively late into the 20th century.

The whole backdrop to its collecting, therefore, was focused on research materials, primary sources, but layered onto that was legal deposit.

So from 1610, the library entered into a partnership with the company of stationers, with the old guild that held the monopoly of printing in Britain, and they did a deal whereby any book printed by a member of the company would be deposited free of charge in the Bodleian Library.

And that was mostly not adhered to, but still lots of books came.

And gradually that became encoded in law, in the Licensing Acts of the 1660s, and then in the Copyright Act of Queen Anne, 1710, and subsequent acts.

And so we've had this mixture of books on all sorts of subjects and then research materials, manuscripts, archives, rare books that have been acquired through either purchase or gift ever since then.

And famously, when Sir Thomas Bodley founded the library, he didn't really want literature.

He didn't want fiction in English, which he described as baggage books.

He felt that this was not suitable for a learned library.

But of course, that was not adhered to very early on.

So the library of Robert Burton of the Anatomy of Melancholy fame came into the library, which had Shakespeare quartos and things like that in it.

But very interestingly, the legal deposit privilege that we had meant that we were allowed to acquire books for free from the publishers, directly actually from publishers via Stations Hall in London, which included the first editions of great English literature of the period of the Shelleys.

But we said no.

My predecessors said no to the first editions of Jane Austen, of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Brontes.

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