The book-buying habits and library of the late F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, are not subjects that had ever crossed my mind. But then, twice on the same day, I found references to them in books that I was reading.

The first one came in the journals of Arnold Bennett, a favourite book of mine. In it, the novelist describes a visit to the home of the grandee in Grosvenor Gardens. I dare say many of my readers will know the property. It stands next to the Oxford Tube stop near Victoria station and bears a plaque testifying to Birkenhead’s former occupancy.

Bennett had got to know the Lord Chancellor, as Birkenhead was, through his membership of the Other Club which had been founded by Smith and Winston Churchill in 1911. Since it met at the Savoy Hotel, where Bennett was a perennial guest and which he immortalised in the novel Imperial Hotel, it was almost inevitable that he should have been recruited.

No doubt he would have been impressed by Smith’s wit which was recognised almost to rival that of his namesake Sydney Smith, the “Smith of Smiths” as Lord Macaulay called him. My favourite example of it comes in a courtroom exchange when a judge told him: “I have read your case, Mr Smith, and am no wiser now then when I started,” to which the barrister replied: “Possibly not, My Lord, but far better informed.”

Writing in the journals, Bennett records: “Dined at F.E. Smith’s. An enormous house, considering it isn’t a special house, but only at the corner of a row. The library is even equal to his boastings about it, but he would continually refer to prices. What astonishes me is that he does not keep even really valuable books (from £100 to £2,000 a piece) under glass.”

Smith’s enthusiasm for books had developed during his undergraduate days at Oxford, as I discovered while reading the splendid new publication written by Blackwells’ archivist Rita Rickets and called Scholars, Poets and Radicals, Discovering Forgotten Lives in the Blackwell Collections.

Tommy Templeton, who became apprenticed at the bookshop in 1926, recalled: “It was legendary that Blackwell’s encouraged long credit. A certain Lord Chancellor’s [the Earl of Birkenhead] three-figure account had not been closed since his undergraduate days. [He] bought books by the yard and had them sumptuously rebound; a practice that must have depressed rather than enhanced the value of many first editions.”

So, as with Bennett’s observations, Smith is seen to have no special regard for the worth of his collection.

Smith’s is one of many big names to figure in Ricketts’s book, among them the Blackwell authors J.R.R. Tolkien, Wilfred Owen, A.A. Milne, Dorothy L. Sayers, Vera Brittain and Edith Sitwell. Blackwell was first to publish Enid Blyton but received “only the crumbs from her table” when she made it big. Richard Blackwell actually turned down Asterix, which was surprising since he had read classics at university.

The Blackwell family naturally figure prominently, among them Sir Basil Blackwell who was still at the helm of the company when I first got to know it in the early 1970s.

It was strange to think that this dapper gentleman had literary connections dating back almost to the dawn of the century. One of them was with Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose guest he often was at Garsington Manor, to the dismay of his disapproving father. Sir Basil later said: “Lady Ottie was a very kind soul who loved taking care of young men . . . helping them in their early years: she came to the conclusion I was a young man to be helped . . . Eventually I had gently to indicate that I was getting married and in a fairly substantial position.”

Among the forgotten lives of the title is that of the bookseller, Rex King, a character justly compared with Jude the obscure. His journals show him to be a shrewd judge of poetry and alive to the genius of Milton shown, for instance, in Lycidas. This is a favourite poem of mine which, like Boris Johnson, I often recite to myself.

As often, I’ll be running through Albert and the Lion which, as it happens, can be sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s song, The Window. Not many people know that.