The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum' - DW's Library

Dennis Wheatley's Library - his Catalogues

The title page (all that remains) of an early
catalogue, circa early 1920s

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DW’s May 1964 Catalogue

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The Blackwell’s 1979 sale catalogue
of the bulk of DW’s Library

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As previous rooms have shown (the D:EGT manuscript in Room Three is a classic example), DW was a natural analyst and cataloguer, and he enjoyed cataloguing his books.

Fragments of his early catalogues survive, mostly in Leeds University Library’s Special Collections. A complete 84 page catalogue of his Library dating to May 1964 (when he transferred the Library to a company he owned for tax reasons), survives in private hands and lists some 2,500 volumes.

The most celebrated catalogue however is the sale catalogue that Oxford booksellers Blackwell’s produced in order to sell the bulk of his collection when they acquired it after his death. Its 191 pages list some 2,274 items, many of them multi-volume sets. The Blackwell’s sale is discussed at the end of this room.

The opening and closing pages of DW’s
list of books read for 1926

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DW’s library was a reading library, and not just for display. In the early 1920s he maintained annual lists of the books he had read, and the list for 1926 (above) shows that in that year he read a staggering (by modern standards) 130 books.

Towards the end of his life DW made notes at the front of many of the books to record that they had been used when researching his novels, and some of these (but not the best first editions !) also have internal annotations in DW’s own hand.

References : Phil Baker pp 541-543

Provenances : The 1920s catalogue title page and list of books read in 1926 - reproduced with the
permission of Special Collection Leeds, University Library (MS 1942)
Other items – Private collection