Everyman Library gifted a set of 300 literary classics to state schools, including mine, for the millennium, at a cost of £19m. The idea was to furnish young minds for another millennium, but almost all of them were thrown out within a few years, thanks to lanyard-wearing vandals
In September 1969, Elizabeth Taylor acquired a full set of the Everyman Library (1,000 volumes) as a gift for Richard Burton. He would later write, “I shall browse in that place for the rest of my life. They will take up one wall of the room … a fantastic reference library with the index in my head.”