“most of them by such once-popular authors as Ruby M Ayres, Arnold Bennett, Zane Grey, Compton Mackenzie, Howard Spring, EM Delafield… the books that people actually used to read, rather than the books that won prizes or the books now studied on university literature courses.

They rub shoulders and brush spines in a new and probably unique collection of popular fiction at Sheffield Hallam University: a novel archive of novels from the first half of the 20th century.”

And on the topic of Mills & Boon, I’ve just had a book published.

At one ARPF conference I was told by an American researcher that she had an appointment to visit Oxford University’s bunker, in an undisclosed rural location, where they housed their Mills and Boon holdings. I’m not sure that I quite believed her.

I can believe that. In 2009 it was announced that

Millions of books from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, one of the largest and most famous in the world, will soon be on the move – from the dreaming spires of Oxford to the rather more pragmatic surroundings of an industrial estate on the outskirts of Swindon.

Sarah Thomas, the director, announced today that the Bodleian has bought the site and hopes to start work this autumn on a gigantic warehouse to hold 8m volumes – a move that is predicted to solve the library’s storage problems for the next 20 years. [...]

The library’s need for new storage is unarguable: it has been swallowing up neighbouring Oxford buildings for centuries, and the stacks in the 1930s New Bodleian, connected to the main building by an eccentric railway running under a road, have officially been listed as 130% full. Books are stored outside Oxford as far away as Cheshire.

Maybe the M&Bs were stored in one of those places “outside Oxford as far away as Cheshire.”