“My books are my tools. They also serve as my counsel, my consolation, and my comfort. They are my source of wisdom and the font of my education. They are my friends and my delights. They are my surety, when all else is awry, that I have set my confidence in the substantial things of truth and right.” Charles Spurgeon (1834-92)

Though he was best known as a world-renowned author, preacher, and philanthropist, the bookshops of London knew Charles Spurgeon as a voracious reader and an avid collector.

He was the most famous preacher in the world for most of the nineteenth century. In 1854, just four years after his conversion, Charles Spurgeon, then just barely twenty years old, became pastor of London’s famed New Park Street Church—formerly pastored by the famous Puritan’s John Gill and John Rippon. The young preacher was an immediate success. The congregation quickly outgrew their building, moved to Exeter Hall, then to Surrey Music Hall. In these venues Spurgeon frequently preached to audiences numbering in the tens of thousands—all in the days before electronic amplification. In 1861 the congregation moved permanently to the newly constructed Metropolitan Tabernacle. It quickly became the largest congregation in the world.

When he arrived in London, there were just over two hundred members in the congregation. Nearly forty years later, after his lifetime of labor, the number had increased to nearly six thousand. With his rhetorical passion, literary eloquence, and stalwart orthodoxy Spurgeon regularly drew standing-room-only crowds—including the likes of Prime Minister William Gladstone, Lord Chief Justice Campbell, Earl Grey, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of London, Earl Russell, Lord Alfred Paget, Lord Panmure, Earl Shaftesbury, the Duchess of Sutherland, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Livingstone several members of the Royal family, innumerable members of Parliament, as well as throngs of the common folk of London—to both the Sunday and weekday services at the church.

His popularity caused great demand for his printed sermons which circulated in almost countless volumes. In one year a quarter of a million copies of his sermon tracts were distributed in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. A number of prominent American newspapers printed the sermons every week and called him the, greatest preacher of the age. Over the years Spurgeon published nearly four thousand sermons and over a hundred books on a wide variety of subjects.

He was also the founder of more than sixty philanthropic institutions including orphanages, colporterage societies, schools, colleges, clinics, and hospitals. In addition he established more than twenty mission churches and dozens of Sunday and Ragged Schools throughout England.

But in the midst of the busyness of his life and ministry, he always found time to read. Books were his most constant companions and bookstores were his most regular haunts.

He was born in the little Essex village of Kelvedon in 1834. Both his father and grandfather were pastors and so he was raised around books, reading, and piety. As a youngster, he began a life long habit of diligent and unending reading—typically he read six books per week, and was able to remember what he had read and where he had read it many years later. He particularly loved old books. He claimed in his autobiography that before he was ten years old, he preferred to go into his grandfather's study and pull down an old Puritan classic and read rather than go outside and play with friends.

As he grew older, his passion for books, and the little shops that sold them, remained unabated. Each day Spurgeon would scour the newspapers to find when an antiquarian book shop might be selling certain books. He would then beat a hasty path to the shop to purchase the treasure—or if he was too busy that day with appointments, he would send his secretary to buy the book. In time, his personal library numbered more than twelve thousand volumes.

The books were all shelved in Spurgeon’s study at Westwood, his family home. The oldest book in the Collection was a commentary on the Book of Psalms by the infamous inquistor, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (1482-1531). Written in Latin and published in Rome in 1476, Spurgeon found it on the bottom shelf of one of his favorite bookshops just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. He acquired a magnificent set of the complete works of Thomas Chalmers—signed, numbered, and in mint condition. He also had rare copies of the commentaries by Matthew Henry, John Calvin, Adam Clarke, Robert Jamieson, Isaac Williams, and Nicholas Byfield. The hymns of Isaac Watts, the compilations of John Rippon, Samuel, John and Charles Wesley were also collected by him—resulting in an outstanding accumulation of hymns written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Of course, Spurgeon was not merely a collector. He was utilitarian, if anything. He viewed his books as the tools of his trade. And the shops where he found them were essentially his hardware stores. As a result, the books were used. They were hardly museum pieces, despite their scarcity or value. They were the natural extensions of his work and ministry.

The great library he collected over his lifetime was kept intact after his death in 1892. Mrs. Spurgeon wanted to retain the library intact as a memorial to her husband. She hoped ultimately to have both Westwood and the library there turned into a kind of museum. But then when she died in 1903, their twin sons, Thomas and Charles, decided that not only did they have to sell the home but they also had to sell the larger part of their father's library. The idea of a museum dedicated to their father seemed financially unfeasible at the time.

They advertised in English newspapers that the books were for sale. Amazingly, the library stood for sale for over two years. Books had to be sold off piecemeal. Eventually, most of the rarest volumes were sold off to individual investors. At last, in 1905 a trustee of William Jewell College, secured the remaining five thousand volumes for the little Baptist college in rural Missouri. There they remained until Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City (one of my alma maters) acquired them along with thousands of additional books, manuscripts, letters, artifacts, and newspaper cuttings from the Heritage Collection from Spurgeon’s College in the United Kingdom.

Together they are now displayed in a beautiful library and museum at the heart of the seminary’s campus—a wonderful tribute to a remarkable ministry, to a love for books, and to a passion for bookshops—standing half a world away from where the great man lived and worked and preached and read.