The Orchid Society of Great Britain is a registered charity, No. 261273
The OSGB library is a large collection of more than 500 books that can be enjoyed by the members completely free of charge. It embraces all topics related to orchids: from cultivation to geographical distribution, from catalogue of genera(families) to book dedicated only to a specific variety, from scientific studies to prominent collectors biographies and congress final publications.
The largest categories of books are general cultivation, orchids families and orchids of south Asia.
Some general books about cultivation as old as 80 years and provide a very interesting view of last century tips and tricks on how to grow orchids: one tip I found very interesting was about using tobacco leave infusion as pest treatment as nicotine is a natural pesticide.
We have multiple comprehensive books about orchids families for the most common genus such as cattleyas and phalaenopsis, but also rarer ones like Angraecum or Vanilla.
The librarian role is to preserve and expand the geographical section in order to cover every country where notable orchids grow. While for Asia and Central America we have entire multi-volume collections, the African continent coverage is patchy: we have few books and we miss entire countries.
Australian orchids are reasonably covered, the European ones are not so represented other than British isles.
The main goal of every library is to share knowledge between us. I would like to encourage all members to appeal to their curiosity and contact me to borrow books or research any material they are interested in, for example, about a specific variety or guide of the flora of a pacific island.
You can contact me by email library@osgb.org.uk and request a specific book or declare your interesting in a topic I can try and help you to find a book for.
Books also can be requested by post, but you will have to cover postage.
Selection of books of different topics and books requested by the members are brought to most OSGB meetings and can be borrowed at the meeting.
Donation is very welcomed and allows our wonderful library to grow and offer more and more material.