"Neither exhaustive nor selective" Legal deposit, Sir Thomas Bodley, and the growth of the music collections at his Library in Oxford Martin Holmes

Legal deposit in the UK can trace its origins back to the agreement made between Sir Thomas Bodley and the Stationers' Company in 1610 whereby its members would deposit copies of their publications in the Bodleian Library. This article describes the difficulties of enforcing that agreement and the subsequent legislation. Music did not begin to flow into the library in any quantity until the 1780s but was largely ignored until the middle of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it forms an important part of the Library's extensive music collections.