Eccentric creator of ’alternative national library’ celebrated

The life of a maverick Welsh collector who built the first major collection of books about Wales is being celebrated 200 years after his birth. Enoch Salisbury, born on 7 November 1819, created a collection of over 18,000 books about Welsh culture, politics, language, geography and beyond. Highlights include a rare piece of black Welsh history, a less than sensitive phrasebook for English travellers in Wales and the scribbles of a noted Welsh forger and cultural pioneer. Salisbury's collection was described at the time as the "most comprehensive collection of works relating to Wales and its people ever made". Despite this recognition he failed to build a national library - which was eventually established in Aberystwyth years later with a different collection - and was declared bankrupt. Members of the public are invited to an event at Cardiff University, where the Salisbury collection is now housed, to mark what would have been his 200th birthday. Head of Special Collections at Cardiff University Libraries, Alan Vaughan Hughes, said: "We joke that it's the 'alternative national library' - but what Salisbury did was visionary.