A small number of interesting collections of children’s books survive in National Trust libraries.

They represent just a fragment of once larger collections.

Presumably the books in countless nurseries were read to destruction by their young owners, and those which survived rough handling must often have been thrown away by succeeding generations.

Only occasionally did they find their way into the library, though the Trevelyan family at Wallington in Northumberland went so far as to create a lending library especially for the use of young visitors to the house.

In addition to these 20th-century books, and similar collections at Wightwick Manor in the West Midlands and Tyntesfield in Somerset, a few properties have preserved some earlier examples.

Collection highlight

The Miniature Library, c1800 London
A La Ronde in Devon

A La Ronde is a strange place – an extraordinary cottage orné traditionally, if implausibly, said to be a marriage of a Devon rustic dwelling and the Byzantine church of S. Vitale in Ravenna.

It was built for the cousins Jane and Mary Parminter, whose family had made their money in the wine trade, and who set up their ménage à deux round about 1795, in fairly obvious emulation of the more famous Ladies of Llangollen.

Some of their books certainly survive in the house today, but the Miniature Library is more of an enigma. It consists of a wooden box whose sliding lid is painted to resemble a bookcase, and contains 29 undated volumes, mostly from one series, all of about 1800.

However, this is not a bespoke item, but one of a series of miniature libraries – fascinating and delightful combinations of toy and reading matter – produced in London by several children’s booksellers.

There are other examples in the Bodleian Library and the V & A, but the real puzzle is how this example ended up at A La Ronde. The Parminters were childless spinsters, and though the whole house is like a doll’s house, it is difficult to see why they might have wanted children’s books.

The answer may have come to light by accident. During a public lecture in London in 2001, the Trust’s Libraries Curator was told by a member of the audience who grew up in Exeter in the 1930s that he had a clear memory of a set of miniatures being on sale in a shop in the city. Was it acquired for A La Ronde at that time, perhaps to boost the tourist appeal of a house already packed with curiosities? We shall probably never know.