On Wednesday 7 October 2026 from 10:30am until 4:30pm, Heythrop Library and the British Jesuit Archives are holding a joint open day to allow anyone who is interested an exceptional opportunity to …

In Our journals we introduce you to all our journals; currently, there are over 140 live journals we subscribe to. If you would like to explore this series, please click on Title of journal Communio : international Catholic review Published since 1974 ISSN 0094-2065 Held at the Heythrop Library since 1974 Our catalogue record Subject(s) covered Christian theology, Catholic Church, Prayer, Theological reflection.

This coming Wednesday, 7th October 2026, the Heythrop Library will be impacted by the Heythrop Library and the British Jesuit Archives Joint Open Day taking place in the reading room at Mount Street. Although the library will be operating with its usual term-time Wednesday opening hours of 9:30 am to 6:30 pm, there will be no desk space available for use in the reading room…

This is another instalment in a series of us providing subject lists of (post-2000) books we have added in the last seven months (since 1 October 2025, the beginning of our financial year). The list is sorted by date of publication. We hope that these lists will help to share what we have bought or added in the last few months, and make it easy to browse.

The new teaching term at the London Jesuit Centre began on Monday 21 September, which means some changes to the way we handle library membership for LJC students have now come into effect: Going forward, to those enrolled on courses at the London Jesuit Centre we will be offering free half-membership only. This means access to the reading room and borrowing from the collections stored in the reading room at…

In the coming days the Library is open as scheduled, see our opening hours, but the London Jesuit Centre's reception will be unstaffed after 5pm on the following days the front door to our building will be closed: Mon 21st September 2026 (after 6pm front door closed) Tue 22nd September 2026 Wed 23rd September 2026 Thu 24th September 2026…

For those who have looked up our catalogue or read parts of our web page covering collections, you will know that we do not provide access to any ebooks, or indeed many ejournals. There are links from our catalogue, when we have a printed copy of a book, and there is a freely-available digital version of it, but we have (so far?) not bought any books.

From Monday 21 September we will be open for longer again, to support the teaching and learing at the London Jesuit Centre: Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays: 9:30am to 6:30pm Tuedays: 9:30am to 7:30pm (1 extra hour, as trial for Term 1) Fridays: 9:30am to 6pm Saturdays: 9:30am to 2pm Please always check our web page for changes to the opening hours, especially if you are travelling from further away from London. The First LJC term of 2026-27 ends on Fri 4 Dec 2026.

In this post, and later posts in this series on Collections, we try to highlight areas in our collection which are either particular important to our Library’s holdings, or it is maybe not very obvious to the uninitiated that we would have books or journals on this area of theology or philosophy. We hope that our posts in this series will encourage engagement with these areas of our collection.

your Librarian is making good progress and the Library will open at 10:30 today.

Captain’s log. 4 September 2026. As the Library has just turned 100, a slightly longer Captain's log might be in order. The Library's 100th is measured from the point of it being called Heythrop (College) Library, and your captain is coming up to his anniversary (21 September 2021, when he took his seat at the helm of this place of workship): a good time to reflect.

your Librarian is stuck on a train into London. The Library will open later today. Please wait before you travel for an update. The reason for the above: the other two librarians are on holiday, and s person was hit by a train on the Heythrop Librarian 's line. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused.

In the coming days the Library is open as scheduled, see our opening hours, but The London Jesuit Centre's reception will be unstaffed after 5pm on the following days the front door to our building will be closed: Wed 2nd September 2026 Thu 3rd September 2026 Mon 7th September 2026 Tue 8th September 2026 Wed 16th September 2026…

In May 2026 we invited 361 library users (those with active accounts) to respond to a user survey, and 101 people replied. We will share the findings, their responses and our comments (where appropriate) to this user survey 2026. For the third post in the series, we focused on access to specialist faith-based resources. One of the questions we asked our users was, to what extent does limited access to specialist theological, philosophical, or faith‑based resources (e.g.

On Wednesday 6 October 2026 from 10:30am until 4:30pm, Heythrop Library and the British Jesuit Archives are holding a joint open day to allow anyone who is interested an exceptional opportunity to see relics, rare books, historical documents as well as modern books. It is also a chance to see both reading rooms and to enquire about library membership and how to conduct research in the archives.

In Our journals we introduce you to all our journals; currently, there are over 140 live journals we subscribe to. If you would like to explore this series, please click on Title of journal Cistercian studies quarterly Published since 1966 ISSN 1062-6549 Held at the Heythrop Library since 1979 Our catalogue record Subject(s) covered Christian monasticism, Cistercian beliefs and practices, contemplative spirituality.

We measure any of our libraries activities, normally from 1 October of any year to the 30 September of the next year (that's our financial year, and London Jesuit Centre teaching spans usually from mid-October to mid-July). The top 5 most-circulated items are: 1. The spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius 2. Understanding the Spiritual Exercises 3. Alone and on foot…

We are open, as scheduled. See our opening hours. The London Jesuit Centre's reception will be unstaffed after 5pm on Mon 17th and Tue 18th August 2026, so the front door will be closed. If you are planning to arrive after 5pm today or tomorrow, please ring us on 020 7529 4843, or email us at heythroplibrary@jesuit.org.uk The Library is scheduled to be open until 5:30 pm today, and 6.30pm on Tuesday. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Whether you have read some of our posts about our off-site stores, or have seen our page about how to access materials, you will hopefully realize that the Heythrop Library's collections of over 200,000 are spread over four locations: The reading room with about 8,000 books and the latest journal issues (on our catalogue this is the location…

This is another instalment in a series of us providing subject lists of (post-2000) books we have added in the last seven months (since 1 October 2025, the beginning of our financial year). The list is sorted by date of publication. We hope that these lists will help to share what we have bought or added in the last few months, and make it easy to browse.

We had to move the Jesuitica section to keep these books safe. Redecorating the wall behind these shelves will hopefully finish soon... Wait for another video to reveal the transformation. (No books were harmed in this video).

We are open, as scheduled. See our opening hours. The London Jesuit Centre's reception will be unstaffed after 5pm on Mon 3rd and Tue 4th August 2026, so the front door will be closed. If you are planning to arrive after 5pm today or tomorrow, please ring us on 020 7529 4843, or email us at heythroplibrary@jesuit.org.uk The Library is scheduled to be open until 5:30 pm today, and 6.30pm on Tuesday. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

First officer’s log #2. 31 July 2026. The LJC teaching year has finally drawn to a close earlier this month, and with it, the regular classes that take place at the Centre have taken a break for the summer. This means that with slightly fewer in-person visitors to the library to deal with, July and August are ideal months for getting on with some investigative work on our holdings.

In May 2026 we invited 361 library users (those with active accounts) to respond to a user survey, and 101 people replied. We will share the findings, their responses and our comments (where appropriate) to this user survey 2026. For this second post in the series analysing the results of the survey, we turned our attention to the ways in which our users like to use the library, as reported by them.

Title of journal British Catholic History Formerly titled Biographical Studies, 1534-1829 (1951-1956), Recusant History (1957-2014) Published since 1957 ISSN 2055-7973 (Print), 2055-7981 (Online) Held at the Heythrop Library since 2015 Our catalogue record Subject(s) covered British and Irish Catholicism, British and Irish Catholic history Publisher or issuing body’s name Cambridge University Press Web site (last accessed 07/07/2026) …

Here at the Heythrop Library, we have been offering work experience placements for a few years now for those keen to explore a career in the library sector. We are open in theory to anyone aged 16 and over who may feel they would benefit from working with us. In practise, you might be wondering what factors into our process for choosing who to take on – and what goes into crafting an interesting and informative work experience placement.

With the end of the LJC teaching term just around the corner on Friday 10th July, we wanted to give some advance warning of a change we will be making to the free membership we offer to LJC students, from the start of the autumn term in September. From September 2026, we will be offering free half-membership only to those enrolled on courses at the…

We are open, as scheduled. See our opening hours. The London Jesuit Centre's reception will be unstaffed on Tuesday (7 July 2026) after 4pm, so the front door is likely to be closed. If that happens, please ring us on 020 7529 4843, or email us at heythroplibrary@jesuit.org.uk The Library is scheduled to be open until 18:30 today! We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

‍To coincide with the end of the teaching term at the London Jesuit Centre, Heythrop Library is returning to shorter opening hours, from Saturday 11 July 2026, until the start of the new LJC term in mid-September: Monday 9.30am – 5.30pm Tuesday 9.30am – 6.30pm Wednesday 9.30am – 5.30pm Thursday 9.30am – 5.30pm Friday 9.30am – 4.30pm Saturday closed Sunday closed…

At first glance this Bible appears relatively unassuming. I started cataloguing as I normally would by first looking at a book's title page. As I had only paid attention to one part of the title 'The Holy Bible containing the Old & New Testament', I thought this would be a pretty straightforward job.

Friday 10th July is the final day of the LJC term, after which the Heythrop Library will revert to non-teaching-time opening hours. As the London Jesuit Centre’s teaching term draws nearly to an end, we want to alert you to: 4th July 2026: the last Saturday we will be open (9:30 to 14:00) August 2026: the Library will not be open on Saturdays…

In May 2026 we invited 361 library users (those with active accounts) to respond to a user survey, and 101 people replied. We will share the findings, their responses and our comments (where appropriate) to this user survey 2026. We have used our blog a couple of times to write about our users, but when we conducted this survey, we managed to obtain a couple of nuggets about the demographics which we had been unable to capture before.

Last week we quietly made a change how we notify those of you who request books from our off-site stores. However, today we would like to inform you about this change. Before this change: a library team member would draft an email, and send this from our library's email address. This was fairly time-consuming as one cannot simply generate such an email, or just copy information from our system to an email.

This is another instalment in a series of us providing subject lists of (post-2000) books we have added in the last seven months (since 1 October 2025, the beginning of our financial year). The list is sorted by date of publication. We hope that these lists will help to share what we have bought or added in the last few months, and make it easy to browse.

You won't believe this! Unless you are one of the Heythrop Library Crew, a member of the Heythrop Library Committee, or a Trustee of the Jesuits in Britain, you will not know how much it costs to run the Heythrop Library. Most people might assume that we get some kind of funding, but a lot of people do not appreciate that we are…

In Our journals we introduce you to all our journals; currently, there are over 140 live journals we subscribe to. If you would like to explore this series, please click on  Title of journal  Catholic historical review Published since  1915 ISSN  0008-8080 (print) & 1534-0708 (online) Held at the Heythrop Library since  2001 Our catalogue record  Subject(s) covered…

This is another volume from our backlog of uncatalogued items. In this case, the small booklet was part of the former Community Library, which was a big library at the bottom of the building next to us. The Library served the members of the Jesuit Mount Street Community, when about 40 men were living in the building which has been the…