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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 in a Work of the Jesuits in Britain (with the support of their Director of Work), 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.
We do, but only to the UK mainland, and it comes with some special procedures. Please read the following terms and conditions, before emailing us about it.
Version 1.1, February 2024.
The library also operates a postal service which delivers books to your registered UK home address. Readers must cover the cost of postage, both ways (please see https://www.royalmail.com/price-finderfor possible costs). Postal loans are not possible to locations outside the UK mainland (if you are unsure about this, please ask us).
1. Please email us that you would like to start using the Heythrop Library Postal service, and that you agree to the Terms& Conditions, as set out in this document.
2. We will raise an invoice of£50, which we ask you to pay promptly. Please be aware that we ask for an initial BACS transfer of £50; we will use this as credit for any postal loan costs.
Please be aware that any unused credit can be reimbursed if/when your library membership ends, or you state that you no longer wish to use our postal service.
3. Please let us know the answers to the following questions:
a. Is there a safeplace at your address? (in case no one is in at time of delivery)
b. Would you like the parcel to arrive in 24h or 48h? (We use 24h tracked as standard, but – of course –it will cost more of your credit).
c. Do you want us to give Royal Mail your email address, and/or mobile number; or both, or neither(if neither: we need to add our email address for notifications on delivery, when placing the online postage order).
4. You will need to return the books as if you had borrowed them in person, i.e. if the book has been requested by someone else, you will need to return it within the requested 7 days. Also, you are expected to return books before the given due date.
5. You can return any of our books in person, or by post (if the latter, please use tracked delivery).
If the book gets lost either on the way to you, or on the postal return to us, you will need to pay for the replacement costs:
a) If the book is still available, we will charge you the RRP at the time of you reporting it lost as the cost for the replacement.
b) If the book is irreplaceable, we charge a minimum of £50; the exact charge is dependent on the perceived value of the book.
Like with any book borrowed (whether in person or by postal service), the following might impact the speed by which you will receive the book. It can happen that:
a) another borrower may place a request on the book issued to you, at any time. This might mean the time you can borrow the book is very short (once a book has been recalled by another borrower, it should be returned within 7 days of the notification email being sent).
b) If you recall a book, it might take 7days or more to be returned to us, before we can then post it to you.
c) 24 hour tracked delivery cannot always be guaranteed, i.e. it might be delayed by the time we receive the book, and put it into the post box, or indeed the next collection time of the post box.
d) The book is in one of our offsite stores which have the normal delivery times before we can then post it to you (i.e. 3x a week, with cut-offs normally on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays: for delivery to us on Wednesdays, Fridays and Mondays).
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).
When to request a book
If you find a book in our catalogue with the location given as ‘Heythrop Mount Street', it is 'Available' to be borrowed from our reading room (the only other location description for books on-site is 'Heythrop New Acquisitions'). If a book’s location is marked as either
Heythrop Deepstore [up to 2 working days]
or
Heythrop Crown [up to 2 working days]
this means that the book needs to be requested from an off-site store.
Requesting books from off-site stores
In the catalogue, please click on the request option.
Please note that when requesting books from the off-site storage facility, every request defaults to being delivered to Senate House Library. However, Heythrop Library staff will check each request, and manually process them according to the requester’s home library. The following video illustrates this process: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k7F2pvIDSaPs9VxeAXWkfp5YD9w-ipt5/view .
Such requests can take up to 2 working days to be delivered. Since 1 July 2023 the normal delivery days are Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays
Requests get processed 3 times per week:
If a request is placed before 2pm on a
Tuesday -> the book(s) will be delivered on Wednesday
Thursday -> the book(s) will be delivered on Friday
Friday -> the book(s) will be delivered on Monday
Please always wait for the email confirming that the book(s) has/have arrived.
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).