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Paid-for membership (full)
If you do not qualify for free membership (see below), but have a serious interest in studying theology or philosophy, you can apply for paid-for membership. This costs £60 per year and includes the benefit of borrowing any of our borrowable books (on-site at the London Jesuit Centre, ca. 8,000 books), as well as over 140,000 modern volumes. Please use our full membership application form to apply.
Reference-only membership fees
For just using the reading room at Mount Street, with its ca. 8,000 books, we also offer the following reference-only membership fees: £5 per day, £10 per week, or £30 per month. Please note these reference-only membership fees will need to be paid in cash, in person (and in British Pounds). These reference-only memberships do not entitle the member to borrow any books or request books from the offsite stores (ca. 140,000 volumes). Please use our reference-only form to apply for this reference-only membership.
Free membership
Free membership is available to certain categories of readers including members of the Society of Jesus and other religious, any lay partners working full-time in a Work of the Jesuits in Britain, former Heythrop College faculty staff, priests and seminarians, teachers of religious education, London Jesuit Centre students, current HE & FE students and sixth-form students, and those unwaged. To make initial contact about becoming a member of the Heythrop Library, please get in touch. Please use our full membership application form to apply.
If you are an early-career or mid-career scholar, please see our news item on The Professor Carl Stephen Patrick Hunter scholarships.
The Heythrop Library holds over 200,000 volumes on theology, philosophy, biblical studies, church history, spirituality and allied subjects. The collection includes rare printed books and incunabula (please note: these are not stored at the Mount Street reading room).
We only offer scans for chapters or articles, etc., of materials housed in offsite storage.
There is no staff-assisted scanning or photocopying for material housed in the Mount Street reading room.
If you would like a scan from an item in offsite storage, please fill out the form at https://forms.office.com/e/wJutTaEmeX
Like most libraries space is at a premium, and it costs us a lot of money to store materials in offsite stores. Therefore, we often cannot help to take book collections "in bulk".
If you would like to donate up to 10 books, please contact us by email, with a list of titles (including year of publication and author).
If you have more than 10 books, please consider first that about 90% of all pre-2000 books offered to us are held already.
When you contact us please let us also know how quickly you will need to dispose of the books. Finally, be aware that any books not needed will be offered to other Jesuit libraries in the UK, and then if still surplus to requirements we pass books on to a company which sells them on our behalf.
Heythrop Library is open to anyone with a serious interest in theology or philosophy and the related academic disciplines represented in the collection. We welcome enquiries about using the library’s collections and reading room at the London Jesuit Centre. The next two sections of this FAQ answers most membership questions, or download the most current Reader's Guide (link below).