Right in front of you is a handsome pale-stone building: three arches on the ground floor, neat rows of windows above. Look straight ahead to the middle of the courtyard and you’ll spot the words “Bibliotheca Pepysiana” sitting proudly over the central arches.
Now picture yourself as a nosy 17th-century student, arriving here with big curiosity and slightly muddy shoes. Could there really be more than 3,000 hidden treasures inside? Oh yes. This all starts with Samuel Pepys, a man who loved books the way some people love butter biscuits… possibly more. He collected everything: printed books, handwritten manuscripts, maps, engravings, and of course his own diaries, stuffed with the everyday drama of his life.
When Pepys died in 1703, he left the entire collection to Magdalene College. And he wasn’t casual about it. He insisted nothing should ever be removed or added, and everything must stay exactly in its arranged order. So if you get the urge to “just straighten that shelf,” imagine a stern librarian sighing from beyond the grave.
Up on the first floor of this Pepys Building, with its neoclassical Ketton stone façade, the Pepys Library still feels much like it did three centuries ago. Over the entrance you can read “Bibliotheca Pepysiana 1724,” the year the books moved in, under Pepys’s coat of arms watching like a wise old owl.
Inside are the six original diary manuscripts, rare early printed books from the age of Caxton, old English choir books, Sir Francis Drake’s navigation almanacs, and even Isaac Newton’s own copy of Principia Mathematica. There’s also a collection of over 1,800 popular ballads, because Pepys had interests so broad he’d have been impossible to ignore on social media.
The building began in 1670 and took years, with funding hiccups and advice from Robert Hooke; Pepys helped with donations, joking that a book without a home is like a boat without a river. The library often opens in the afternoon, so you can come back and play apprentice Sherlock among the manuscripts. Want more background on Pepys, the collection, or the building? Ask in the chat below.
