Things looked bad. In a report this week in the London Times, which detailed the sale of some of the papers of the new Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, to the British Library, there was a list of writers whose papers were held by the library which included Seamus Heaney. The piece was full of bile about the amount of British literary papers ending up in rich institutions in the US, and Michael Holroyd calling for lottery funds to be made available to buy them, but while the British literary establishment may feel like a financial minnow beside the whale of the US, what are we - a tadpole? In fact, the Heaney "papers" recently "acquired" consist of a wonderful variorum version of the Glanmore Sonnet no. 8 from Field Work which the poet donated to the library's permanent collection.

Other Heaney work in the library came as part of other collections, such as those of Mandible Press and the Poetry Book Society. Heaney still has his papers and, says British Library curator, Christopher Fletcher: "I am quite sure he has very definite plans for them." Brendan O'Donoghue, Director of the National Library of Ireland, admits, however, that the £350,000 a year his institution has to buy new manuscripts is paltry. The library has recourse to a tax credit scheme, whereby a donor can write off the cost of manuscripts against tax, or else a special Government grant, when it needs to buy manuscripts: they hold the papers of Hugh Leonard, for instance, and have recently acquired those of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. As to canvassing for the work of living writers, he explains that it's a delicate matter - he admits they have their eye on the work of a major playwright: "We are conscious of the fact that there are collections out there and we would like to put the idea in the writers' mind that the library would be a suitable home for them."