The Working Library of Robert Graves

When Robert Graves’s widow Beryl Graves died in 2003, she bequeathed together with her late husband’s personal papers his ‘working library’ to Oxford’s St John’s College. The working library consists of over 1,500 volumes and it is still arranged in the same sequence as it was kept in by Robert Graves in Deyá, Mallorca. The collection is an interesting mix of Robert Graves’s own publications as well as those of friends, Classics and English primary and secondary literature, books connected to Graves’s research and literary interests, and private press publications. The working library is accompanied by three boxes of various documents and ephemera found in the books and now stored separately.

Summary Indexes

Downloadable summary indexes will be added soon.

Online Finding Aids

The working library is catalogued on the Oxford University’s online library catalogue SOLO. Currently, not all titles are yet captured in the link provided.

In UK law the copyright usually remains with an ‘author’ (here used in the legal sense of the term) throughout their lifetime. After the author's death, the copyright is transferred to their heirs/ estate and remains valid for 70 years.

With regard to copyright matters in connection with the Personal Papers of Robert Graves at St John's College, please note that St John’s College is not the copyright holder of any publications still protected by copyright law in Robert Graves's working library. The following copyright statement applies:

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system of any nature, or transmitted, in any form or by any means including photocopying and recording, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. It is your responsibility to ascertain the correct copyright owner and St John’s College do not accept any liability for any direct or indirect losses arising out of your use of the images you took yourself or provided to you by St John’s College. Licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency or any other reproduction rights organisation do not apply. If any unauthorised acts are carried out in relation to this copyright work, a civil claim for damages may be made and/or a criminal prosecution may result.

If you would like to consult volumes from the working library of Robert Graves, please use the Research Visit request form or email library@sjc.ox.ac.uk.