The Library has also recently acquired the archives of historian Raphael Samuel, the extensive London Co-operative Society collection and the Freedom Press Library, the latter containing a wide range of internationally published books on anarchism.
Although the Library’s collections are strongest on co-operation, secularism and trade unionism, it also holds a wide range of archive and printed material of interest to researchers exploring the activities and history of the Parliamentary Labour Party and some examples are given below.
This pamphlet, ‘The Labour Party under a Search Light’ by G.S.Penfold, is from the Library’s George Howell collection which holds a wide variety of material relating to early socialism and the development of the Labour Party. Although Howell himself was Liberal MP for Bethnal Green from 1885 to 1895, he was also a keen labour historian and collected a huge selection of pamphlets, books and archival material relating to the labour movement.
The Howell library has been added to since its deposit in 1910 by several generations of librarians at the Institute and it now also contains many modern works on the Labour Party and affiliated organisations.