Unpacking Harold Silver’s Library: An Historian of Education and His Books

This article considers the whittled-down Library of Professor Harold Silver (1928–2021), an important figure in both the history of education and educational policy in the latter part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first. Drawing on oral history interviews and a prepared catalogue of these books, this article considers what a working scholarly library can tell us about not only an important scholarly career, individual working practices, and the changing nature of academic publishing and careers. By using oral histories combined with the books as material, printed objects, I explore what the books can tell us individually, and reconstruct Harold’s Library and the work done within it. I also offer some reflections on the emotional experience of handling another person’s books.