Paid-for membership (full)
If you do not qualify for free membership (see below), but have a serious interest in studying theology or philosophy, you can apply for paid-for membership. This costs £60 per year and includes the benefit of borrowing any of our borrowable books (on-site at the London Jesuit Centre, ca. 8,000 books), as well as over 140,000 modern volumes. Please use our full membership application form to apply.
Reference-only membership fees
For just using the reading room at Mount Street, with its ca. 8,000 books, we also offer the following reference-only membership fees: £5 per day, £10 per week, or £30 per month. Please note these reference-only membership fees will need to be paid in cash, in person (and in British Pounds). These reference-only memberships do not entitle the member to borrow any books or request books from the offsite stores (ca. 140,000 volumes). Please use our reference-only form to apply for this reference-only membership.
Free membership
Free membership is available to certain categories of readers including members of the Society of Jesus and other religious, any lay partners working full-time in a Work of the Jesuits in Britain, former Heythrop College faculty staff, priests and seminarians, teachers of religious education, London Jesuit Centre students, current HE & FE students and sixth-form students, and those unwaged. To make initial contact about becoming a member of the Heythrop Library, please get in touch. Please use our full membership application form to apply.
If you are an early-career or mid-career scholar, please see our news item on The Professor Carl Stephen Patrick Hunter scholarships.
Readers may currently take up to six books out on loan for up to four weeks.
How can I renew books?
1 Go to catalogue
2 Log in with your name and your Heythrop Library card number (starting with ‘019…’)
3 Click on x items currently checked out
4 You can then try to ‘renew all’, or select specific books and ‘renew selected’. If you have problems with renewing, please ask for your books to be renewed in person, or by contacting us.
The following cannot be borrowed:·
* Periodicals
* Reference books (with red spine labels on books in our reading room)
* Restricted or fragile items (you will be informed as soon as we have assessed them)
Some items in the Heythrop Library collections are too fragile to leave the library. We cannot guarantee that all books ordered from the off-site store will be in a condition fit for borrowing until they arrive. The librarians will alert readers if fragile books need to be consulted as reference-only materials in the Mount Street reading room. Such decisions may be made at short notice. We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes and thank you for your understanding.
Once you have borrowed a book for 6 months, automatic renewals will stop and you will either need to return the book(s), or renew it/them manually. To renew books manually, please
1. Go to our catalogue (https://catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/search~S3)
2. Click on "Login to your account"
3. Use your first name and surname (with a space, so "Sally Smith")
4. The Heythrop Library card number can be found on the back of your Heythrop Library card, without spaces: 019....
5. Click on '[x] Item currently checked out"
6. Renew all, or select those you wish to renew, and click on "Renew selected".
7. The system will show the new due date.
If this does not work, please contact us: heythroplibrary@jesuit.org.uk
When to request a book
If you find a book in our catalogue with the location given as ‘Heythrop Mount Street', it is 'Available' to be borrowed from our reading room (the only other location description for books on-site is 'Heythrop New Acquisitions'). If a book’s location is marked as either
Heythrop Deepstore [up to 2 working days]
or
Heythrop Crown [up to 2 working days]
this means that the book needs to be requested from an off-site store.
Requesting books from off-site stores
In the catalogue, please click on the request option.
Please note that when requesting books from the off-site storage facility, every request defaults to being delivered to Senate House Library. However, Heythrop Library staff will check each request, and manually process them according to the requester’s home library. The following video illustrates this process: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k7F2pvIDSaPs9VxeAXWkfp5YD9w-ipt5/view .
Such requests can take up to 2 working days to be delivered. Since 1 July 2023 the normal delivery days are Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays
Requests get processed 3 times per week:
If a request is placed before 2pm on a
Tuesday -> the book(s) will be delivered on Wednesday
Thursday -> the book(s) will be delivered on Friday
Friday -> the book(s) will be delivered on Monday
Please always wait for the email confirming that the book(s) has/have arrived.
Heythrop Library is open to anyone with a serious interest in theology or philosophy and the related academic disciplines represented in the collection. We welcome enquiries about using the library’s collections and reading room at the London Jesuit Centre. The next two sections of this FAQ answers most membership questions, or download the most current Reader's Guide (link below).