Legal Deposit and Modern Scale

Bodley's most consequential institutional achievement came in 1610, when he reached an agreement with the Stationers' Company of London, the guild that controlled the printing trade and its official register, under which a copy of every book entered on the Stationers' register would be deposited in the Bodleian Library free of charge. This early legal deposit arrangement, formalized and extended by subsequent copyright legislation over the following centuries, meant the library's holdings grew automatically alongside the output of the English and later British publishing industry rather than depending solely on active acquisition, a structural advantage few other libraries in the world have enjoyed for so long a period.

The arrangement continues today in modified form under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act, with the Bodleian remaining one of a small number of libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland entitled to claim a copy of every book published domestically. Over four centuries this combination of legal deposit, manuscript acquisition and donation has built the Bodleian into one of the largest libraries in the world, holding more than 13 million printed items along with major manuscript, map and rare book collections that include material spanning medieval alchemical and astrological texts through modern scientific archives, making it, alongside the British Library, one of the two largest library collections in the United Kingdom.