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Jonathan [John Louis] Cutbill (1937-2019) was a bookseller, book collector, civil servant, and gay rights campaigner.  

With Ernest Hole and Peter Dorey, Cutbill founded the Gay’s the Word bookstall which developed into in 1979. Cutbill was one of the bookshop’s directors and it was in this role that he became a defendant in the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids and proposed trial.  

Over many decades, Cutbill collected approximately 30,000 English language books covering LGBTQ+ literature, social science, and history, alongside numerous pamphlets, newspapers, and cuttings. As the executor of Edward Carpenter’s estate, Cutbill also owned an archive of material related to Carpenter. As Andrew Lumsden noted in his entry about Jonathan Cutbill in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the collection is the “greatest of known personal English-language LGBT+ collections”.  

Before his death in 2019, Cutbill gifted his collection to Senate House Library, where it is currently held as a special collection. Most of the books on display in the Seized Books! exhibition are from this collection, which is formally called the Haud Nominandum collection, a Latin phrase chosen by Cutbill which broadly translates as ‘that which cannot be named’.