Staple Inn library

Institute and Faculty of Actuaries Library (Staple Inn)
Staple Inn Hall
High Holborn
LONDON
WC1V 7QJ

Tel. + 44 (0)20 7632 2114 Fax. + 44 (0)20 7632 2111

Opening hours are 09.00 - 17.00 hrs Monday to Friday

email: libraries@actuaries.org.uk

What's in the library?

There are four private study spaces and one PC workstation to access the website and internet. We can provide login facilities for those wishing to access the internet with a laptop PC. The Librarian is pleased to help with enquiries and research.

Modern books and periodicals, formerly a teaching and research library held at Napier House, Oxford, transferred back to Staple Inn library in November 2011. The special collection of books and manuscripts remain at Staple Inn Library along with overseas actuarial journals, reference books and directories. Staple Inn has a full set of Core Reading and ActEd course material for reference use (we do not lend or photocopy ActEd materials by agreement), together with past examination papers, solutions, and examiners' comments.  The Library holds titles that are suggested reading for CT and SA examinations and can request other titles from the Edinburgh library for collection from Staple Inn.

We look forward to improving library facilities at Staple Inn over the coming months and will keep members updated. Some 1900 -1980 publications and hardcopy journals are held in interim storage and can be retrieved at24 hours notice. We can advise if there may be access to an online source for your request.

The Library dates from the foundation of the Institute in 1848. From 1886 it was housed in the Hall of Staple Inn, formerly an Inn of Chancery. After bomb damage to Staple Inn in 1944, books were evacuated but the Library returned to Staple Inn when the Hall was rebuilt in 1955. The Library is now located in the basement.

About the original library

R.C. Simmonds (1950) The Institute of Actuaries 1848-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 1950) has an account of the Institute's first hundred years and the development of the Library (pages 277-287).

The historical books collection contains some 3000 books on actuarial science and its applications, demography, economics, insurance, mathematics, probability and statistics. There are over 1000 books and pamphlets dating before 1901 and those published before 1861 are in separate safe storage.

Most rare books derive from donations, including the gift in 1849 of part of the library of Edwin James Farren, Actuary of the Asylum Life Office, and many donations from Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871). The Institute began buying books at the outset and from 1865 to 1974 with a fund in memory of Peter Hardy F.R.S. (1813-1863) whose own library passed to his son Ralph Price Hardy, also an actuary. The latter in turn offered a few rare books to the Institute Library. Dispersals from the library have taken place between 1880 and 1940 (saving them from war damage) but the library retains many manuscripts and proof copies for which it had gained renown.

The first printed catalogues were included in the Institute Constitution and List of Members of 1849-50, 1851 and 1852 and subsequently in the full published Catalogue of the Library of the Institute of Actuaries of 1880 (Author and classified subject index), 1894, 1907 and 1935. Additions to the Library were announced annually in the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries from 1908 to 1989.

The Library database catalogue has records for all its special collection books, manuscripts and pamphlets held at Staple Inn. The Library continues to acquire early works on compound interest, demography, life insurance and probability which pioneered actuarial science and were applied by the first professional actuaries. A catalogue of books published before 1901 that are held in the Institute and Faculty collections (the latter held at Edinburgh University Library) is available as a pdf document.

Highlights from the special collections

Manuscripts

Original tables calculated by (Institute) actuaries investigating company mortality data; Frederick Hendriks Research notes relating to the discovery in 1851 of Johan De Witt's treatise on life annuities, 1671 contains autograph letters with European politicians and documents, translations from the Dutch, portraits and plates and led to his articles 'Contributions to the history of insurance, and the theory of life contingencies', Journal of the Institute of Actuaries I and II (1851, 1852).

Mathematics

Coverage includes works of probability and logarithm tables, from the 17th to 19th centuries. There are some of the rarest books in the Library and items cited in English Short Title Catalogue bibliographies: Ian Trenchant, L'Arithmetique (1558); Ludolph Van Ceulen, Van den Circkel (1596) on compound interest; Nicolas Struyck, Uytreekening der kanssen in het speelen, door de arithmetica en algebra, beneevens een vehandeling van looteryen en interest... [1716]; Charles Babbage, Specimen of logarithm tables printed with different coloured inks on variously coloured papers (1831) has a manuscript note 'only 1 copy having been printed' and a letter presentation to W. Streatfield; and works by Abraham De Moivre such as The Doctrine of chances (1756).

Mortality statistics

The collection includes: Company of Parish Clerks of London, London's dreadful visitation. Or, A Collection of all the Bills of Mortality for the present year... (1665) at the time of the Great Plague; classics such as John Graunt, Natural and political observations [...] made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662) and Thomas Short, New observations, natural, moral, civil, political and medical on city, town and country bills of mortality (1750).

Theory of life assurance and annuities

Many works of the 18th and 19th centuries e.g. Abraham De Moivre, Annuities upon lives (1725) - arguably the first book on actuarial science; Richard Price, Observations on reversionary payments, 1st ed. (1771) and later editions; Charles Babbage, A comparative view of the various institutions for the assurance of lives (1826).

Insurance prospectuses and promotional leaflets.

This collection is said to have started with the gift from the Clerical, Medical and General Assurance Society of a bound volume of various companies' prospectuses (with reports to policyholders and specimen policy conditions) trawled from the period 1832-1851. Another set is in three volumes bound by the Colonial Life Assurance Company in 1846 covering English, Irish, Scottish and foreign offices. Also, there is a volume of statutes of French and German insurance companies of the 1850s.

Pamphlets have been bound in a series of 'Tracts' covering mainly nineteenth-century life assurance, statistics, friendly societies, mortality rates with some Dutch, French and German insurance literature. They include a collection bought in 1880 from Cornelius Walford (1827-1885), author of The Insurance Cyclopaedia ... (volumes 1-V: Aba - Han) (1871-1880). Some 'Tracts' pamphlets listed in 1907 have been later disbound but all are traceable using the Library database catalogue.

Newmarch collection

The Royal Statistical Society has deposited six volumes of pamphlets - mainly on life assurance bequeathed by William Newmarch F.R.S.S. (1820-1882), Manager of Glyn Mills and Company Bank - with the Institute Library upon permanent loan.

Serials

Staple Inn Library holds several current journals of American and European actuarial associations. Its historical holdings include Post Magazine (weekly news on the insurance industry) from 1849 onwards and Transactions of the International Congress of Actuaries from 1895.

Equitable Life archive

The Institute and Faculty acquired the Archive of the Equitable Life Assurance Society dating from 1762 to 1950 and associated historical research in 2006. The Society was the first to practise actuarial science in insurance and the Archive takes a special place in the profession's heritage.

Archive of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries

Since it began, originally in the foundation of the Institute of Actuaries in 1848 (Royal Charter, 1884) and then of the Faculty of Actuaries in 1856 (Royal Charter, 1868) the British actuarial profession has fostered production of education textbooks for student actuaries and technical papers dedicated to its subject field through the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries (1951-1994) and Transactions of the Faculty of Actuaries (1901-1997) - now the British Actuarial Journal since 1995. The achievements of leading figures and professional committees in contributing to legislation with appropriate public interest roles for actuaries can be traced through the respective Yearbooks and Members Handbooks of the two organisations. The Libraries also maintain albums of photographs of actuaries since 1848 with their insurance company associations. In 2010, the memberships of the two bodies voted for merger as the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.