Ron Heisler Collection: a radical repository

Ron Heisler is a book collector, trade unionist, lifelong socialist and self-proclaimed “delinquent historian”.

Since 2004, he has been donating to the University of London’s Senate House Library a collection of material relating to the Chartists, the Independent Labour and Communist parties, Trotskyist groups, the Spanish Civil War, South Africa, the Caribbean, the former Soviet Union and much more.

As well as some 25,000 books, 20,000 pamphlets, 3,000 journals and newspaper titles, there are many examples of extremely rare and even unique political ephemera.

Some of the most striking covers in the Ron Heisler Collection have now been made available to researchers and the public on a new website.

This forms the first component of a much larger Radical Voices project, designed to make more collections accessible, which the library is planning with the support from the Institute of Historical Research.

matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com