 My name's Adrian Edwards and I'm standing here in the British Library in front of the King's Library Tower. This six-story book tower contains two important collections of rare books, the Private London Library of King George III and the Library of the Gentleman Book Collector and Politician Thomas Grenville. Both collections came into public ownership in the mid-19th century, but since 1989 they've been here where they form a centrepiece to the building designed for the British Library by the architect Colin Sinjan Wilson. If you've visited the British Library you'll be familiar with the outside of the tower, but today we're going to take a rare look at what's on the inside. So here we are inside the King's Library Tower. The lighting's quite subdued and the temperature's quite cool. We try to maintain it at around 61 Fahrenheit, 16 centigrade and a relative humidity of 50%, those being the ideal conditions for the long-term preservation of antiquarian books made predominantly of ragpaper, leather and parchment. The books on my right are those belonging to Thomas Grenville and on my left we have the backs of the shelves with the King's Library. The King's Library of George III is by far the larger of the two collections comprising around 80,000 volumes as opposed to 16,000 volumes, but actually the two collections are quite similar. Both were put together in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, both contain books dating back to the beginnings of European printing in the 1450s and both cover the widest possible range of subjects and languages. In fact both collectors often collected the same editions. They both for example have a Gutenberg Bible, a range of Caxton editions and a Shakespeare first folio. If there is a difference I'd say it was King George III's greater interest in collecting pamphlets and technical manuals. Let's have a look at a couple of items from the shelves. So this item is from Thomas Grenville's collection. It's the Shakespeare first folio, perhaps the most famous book of English literature. It was published seven years after Shakespeare's death and contains 36 of his plays, 18 of which do not otherwise survive either in printed books or as manuscripts. So plays such as this one, Macbeth, would not otherwise survive. We wouldn't be able to go and see a performance today if it wasn't for this publication. The same applies to other plays such as Julius Caesar or A Midsummer Night's Dream. So this item is from the collection of King George III and shows his interest in more technical materials. It's a collection of lectures about how to shoe a horse, particularly how to build horseshoes for hooves that are perhaps diseased in some way or other. The lectures are by the Professor of the New Veterinary College in North London and they were published in 1793. The printed work is interesting enough but what makes this special is the accompanying box. This contains six plaster casts of horseshoes and six brass horseshoes. Each one is a different shape. So here we have a convex horseshoof and the shoe designed to fit and I think it's really special that these pieces have all stayed together and intact for well over 200 years. I hope you've enjoyed this behind the scenes tour and we're really looking forward to seeing you again.