The Bodleian Library is Oxford’s copyright library and it recently opened up a new underground area connecting the Rad Cam and the Old Bod. Down there there is a “personal development collection” someone has donated and the books are loanable, unlike all the other books in the library which must remain within the building.

I wanted one of these books, The Mindful Way Through Depression, which is a book about mindfulness and which I am told by the person who told me about it that it’s not at all about depression and the title is just a selling point, and that it’s a book everyone can get something out of.

So I headed down and the librarian who helped me was very excited, saying that this is the first ever loan since the new room only opened last night, and he said that this book (which he had read) was a great one to be starting with. And with that I became the first ever person to have a book loaned to them by the Bodleian Library in all the hundreds of years it has existed. Much congratulations from the librarians.