Donation of the British Council Anglo-Portuguese Collection

This collection, also known as the British Council Collection, is a bibliographic collection on Anglo-Portuguese themes, comprising 6,195 items of publications dated between the 17th century and the 1970s, including 6,041 monographs and 154 issues of 83 periodicals.
This is a documentary set of significant cultural and scientific interest for researchers and students, especially in the fields of Anglo-Portuguese studies and translation. It includes:
The most represented writers are Shakespeare and Camões. Notable translations of Os Lusíadas include those by Fanshaw (1655) and Mickle (1776). The collection also includes the first translation of Peregrinação (The voyages and adventures) by Fernão Mendes Pinto (1653), as well as The Life of Dom John de Castro by Freire de Andrada (1664) and The History of Portugal (1698) by Faria de Sousa.





The collection was created and developed from 1938 by Professor George West, the first director of the British Council in Portugal, with the collaboration of the librarian Dr. Carlos Estorninho, who managed it until around 1980.
Donated to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in the same year, the collection was incorporated into the then-General Library, complementing the so-called International Library, which had been initiated many years earlier by Ambassador Pedro Theotónio Pereira with the aim of creating a core of foreign books about Portugal. In 1984, a bibliographic catalogue of the collection was published.
With the transformation of the General Library of the Foundation into the General Library of Art in 1995, later renamed the Art Library three years later, it became necessary to refocus and specialise its thematic scope around the Visual Arts. This process, which began to take on strategic importance in 2017, has since resulted in successive campaigns to redistribute publications to a carefully selected group of university libraries and other entities in different regions of the country, thus contributing to the strengthening and enrichment of their collections and promoting access to sources of knowledge, while reflecting the Foundation’s commitment to sustainable practices and the effective reuse of resources by the community.
This donation is part of an ongoing process of contributions by the Foundation to the Faculdade de Letras of the Universidade de Lisboa library, which includes 200 copies of publications on Arab History and Culture (2017); 6,717 copies of monographs in the fields of Art, Theatre, and History (2019); 1,167 copies of monographs from the International Library, including some dedicated to African Studies (2022); 288 copies of works related to bibliographies (2023).