Sometime in the summer of 2025, a medium-sized van made a delivery to Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop on Bloomsbury Street run by supporters of the Socialist Workers Party. Its cargo: several storage lockers' worth of books, offered for sale but ultimately handed over as a straightforward donation. By March of this year they had made their way onto the shop's second-hand shelves, where they were noticed, quite by chance, by a visitor with a longer memory of the Trotskyist movement's turbulent history than most browsers are likely to possess.
What that visitor found deserves serious attention from anyone concerned with the historical record of the international Trotskyist movement: multiple sets of the Workers Revolutionary Party's Trotskyism versus Revisionism series, volumes of the collected works of Marx and Lenin, editions of Trotsky's writings, and — running through a striking number of them — the handwritten annotations and ownership marks of Gerry Healy himself.
Healy, the central leader of the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party from the 1950s until his expulsion in October 1985, was for three decades one of the dominant and most controversial figures of British Trotskyism. His political and personal collapse — the subject of an internal WRP inquiry that documented sustained abuse of party members, and of Aidan Beatty's recent study The Party is Always Right — has been extensively examined. Rather less has been established with any precision about what became of his personal library and papers afterward, a gap this discovery goes some way toward filling, while opening at least as many questions as it answers.
A donation, not a sale
According to an account given to the visitor by Bookmarks staff, a representative of Vanessa Redgrave — who, together with her brother Corin, remained among Healy's most prominent defenders through the 1985 split and its aftermath — approached the SWP in early 2025 offering two storage lockers of books for sale. The SWP, as a matter of policy, does not purchase stock in this way; the books were donated instead, collected by van several months later, and subsequently placed on general sale through the shop and its social media channels, with no indication given to browsers of their provenance.
Whether this material constitutes the whole of what remained of Healy's library, or only a portion of it, is not yet established. Healy was a voracious and constant reader and annotator across five decades of political activity; a library assembled over that period, even after whatever depletions occurred amid the chaos of 1985 and after, would represent a substantial archive. The presence of what appear to be WRP organisational holdings — material that would properly have belonged to the party itself, including books that may originate from its Clapham headquarters — alongside items unmistakably marked as Healy's own, raises a further question: by what route did organisational property end up in private hands to be disposed of four decades later as a job lot of second-hand stock?
What the annotations preserve — and what is being lost
The books bearing Healy's marginalia are of more than sentimental interest. Healy's habit of dense, engaged annotation — recorded in the private diaries kept by his secretaries during his years in the leadership, excerpts of which appear in Corinna Lotz and Bob Pitt's biography Gerry Healy: A Revolutionary Life — was integral to how he worked through political and philosophical material. Marginalia of this kind is primary source material: it shows not what a historical actor concluded in a finished text but how he arrived there, what he underlined, disputed, or returned to. Dispersed piecemeal across a secondhand shelf, sold to whichever customer happens to want a cheap copy of Trotskyism versus Revisionism, that material is effectively lost to research — not destroyed outright, but scattered beyond any hope of a future historian reconstructing it.
This is the substantive issue raised by the discovery, whatever the eventual answer to the narrower question of exactly whose books these were. An archive of this character — bearing on the internal life, reading, and political formation of a central leader of a organisation that at its height claimed real influence in the trade unions and drew figures from Vanessa Redgrave to Ken Livingstone into its orbit, and whose later history involved substantiated allegations of serious abuse requiring documentation, not disposal — belongs in a properly catalogued research collection: a university archive with existing Trotskyist and labour movement holdings, such as Warwick's Modern Records Centre, or a comparable institution such as the Bishopsgate Institute, not in the general second-hand trade.
An open question
None of this yet amounts to a documented account of how these books left Redgrave's possession and reached Bookmarks, or of whether "Redgrave's library" and "Healy's library" are in fact two different things that have been run together. The visitor whose account informs this article has raised the further, sharper possibility — based on their own purchase of books from Redgrave's collection sold off in 1984, prior to the split, which they report bore her own name rather than Healy's — that what has now surfaced at Bookmarks is not residual material from Redgrave's own shelves at all, but Healy's personal and organisational library passing through her hands into general circulation four decades later.
That claim requires further documentary verification before it can be treated as established. What is not in question is that a substantial quantity of material connected to one of the central and most contested figures in the postwar history of British Trotskyism is currently being sold, unremarked and unrecorded, across a bookshop counter. Anyone with knowledge of the provenance of this material, or with an interest in seeing it preserved intact, would do well to raise the matter directly with Bookmarks and with Redgrave's representatives before the shelves are cleared.
