Every writer has a reference library of some kind. I’d like to introduce you to mine!
The physical part of it at least. I also have a collection of ebooks and PDFs, including the 1894 Baedeker’s guide to London and its Environs and copies of The Strand Magazine from 1891. I also have newspaper clippings and saved web pages relating to crimes, science and all manner of strangeness which I think I’ll need for upcoming projects.
My two shelves of reference books are packed to bursting with books about forensics, London, music, queer history, 19th century medicine and medieval society. Not all of the related books have been written yet, but some research on Victorian-era underwear and sailing ships was used in writing The Adventure of the Colonial Boy. and the medieval books were used to write the origin story for Kitty and Cadaver – Hoorfrost – which is in my upcoming short story collection Scar Tissue and Other Stories.
The top shelf is home to much history and science of forensics (mainly for use in my Sherlock Holmes stories so I get the science correct for the era) and books about Victorian London. I have several on the history of queer London of the era and trans history, in part for canon-era Holmes♥Watson stories and partly for something I’m planning set in 1890s Melbourne.
The music books are used for the Duo Ex Machina series and for Kitty and Cadaver. The British folklore will be used in the as yet unwritten sequel to Kitty and Cadaver, which I’ll get to eventually.
In the centre of the bottom shelf are the notebooks full of research I’ve conducted in the British Library: they contain notes about medieval London, pages and pages on Frost Fairs, Victorian-era clothing and culture; many pages about ravens, and the history of the London Underground.
For my Melbourne-based stories, the Melway is invaluable. (I use Google Maps for London locales when I’m not actually in London – I used both methods for Ravenfall. I really should get a London A-Z.) I’ll use The Australian Hostess Cookbook in the third Gary and Lissa book (also on the cards in due course, after The Opposite of Life is reissued by Clan Destine Press). I’ve also been learning more about 1890s Melbourne, but I don’t expect to get to that project until at least next year.
These are two very tiny books that my mum had in her shelves of Indigenous place names and words. I’m not sure yet when or how I’ll use them, but they’re there when I need them.
I’m often finding new books to add – I’ve picked up several new ones on bees and British wildlife for a project I’m looking at later this year. Among the books I’ve collected over the last year are The Butchering Art , about the work of Joseph Lister (yes, Listerine is named for him) who pioneered antiseptics in 19th century surgery. The fictional Dr Watson would have graduated from medical school at about the time Lister’s ideas were actually being accepted and taught.
You can also see jammed among the titles three wonderful secondhand bookstore finds: The Scientist would definitely be a book in my vampire Gary Hooper’s library. A Girl at Government House states it’s the diaries of a young girl in service in Australia in the 1880s and 90s, and Two Years Before the Mast is an account of a man’s life at sea in the mid 19th century, so it’ll be another layer of primary-document information to help make my Victorian era fiction if not accurate then at least less inaccurate.
Why yes, I do have rather a lot of potential projects in my future. And this doesn’t count the several I haven’t actually mentioned yet!
Feel free to ask me about any of the books you can see in those shelves. I aim to write about a few more of them as I use them (and discover if they will serve their purpose well enough!)
