An industrial estate in West Yorkshire may not seem like the obvious home for a treasure trove of British literature, yet it’s the little known home of 75% of the British Library’s entire catalogue of books.
The unassuming building is located in Boston Spa, near to Wetherby, and houses around 127.5 million books, spread across the equivalent of 373 miles worth of shelving. Unlike a traditional library, the storage facility is more akin to an Amazon warehouse, with robots picking boxes from the shelves to fulfil book requests from across the country.
Speaking to The Times, Alasdair Bruce, a manager at the British Library recently spoke about the facility and how it was needed in order to store the books the British Library acquired, as it traditionally keeps a copy of every single book, newspaper and journal that is ever published in the UK.
