Other holdings on the seven foremost authors ( G. Overall, the Wade Center has more than 11,000 volumes including first editions and critical works. Wade Center, located at Wheaton College, Illinois, is devoted to the work of seven British authors including four Inklings. Later pub meetings were at The Lamb and Flag across the street, and in earlier years the Inklings also met irregularly in yet other pubs, but The Eagle and Child is the best known. During the war years, beer shortages occasionally rendered the Eagle and Child unable to open and the group instead met at other pubs, including the White Horse and the Kings Arms. The publican, Charlie Blagrove, let Lewis and friends use his private parlour for privacy the wall and door separating it from the public bar were removed in 1962. The Inklings and friends were also known to gather informally on Tuesdays at midday at a local public house, The Eagle and Child, familiarly and alliteratively known in the Oxford community as The Bird and Baby, or simply The Bird. Until late 1949, Inklings readings and discussions were usually held on Thursday evenings in C. On the association between the two 'Inklings' societies, Tolkien later said "although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into being at that time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not." When Lean left Oxford in 1933, the society ended, and Tolkien and Lewis transferred its name to their group at Magdalen College. The society consisted of students and dons, among them Tolkien and Lewis. The name was associated originally with a society of Oxford University's University College, initiated by the then undergraduate Edward Tangye Lean around 1931, for the purpose of reading aloud unfinished compositions. Meetings were not all serious the Inklings amused themselves by having competitions to see who could read the notoriously bad prose of Amanda McKittrick Ros for the longest without laughing. Tolkien's fictional Notion Club (see " Sauron Defeated") was based on the Inklings. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, and Williams's All Hallows' Eve were among the novels first read to the Inklings.
![the inkling the inkling](https://previewsworld.com/SiteImage/MainImage/STL147238.jpg)
Readings and discussions of the members' unfinished works were the principal purposes of meetings. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections." As was typical for university literary groups in their time and place, the Inklings were all male. "Properly speaking," wrote Warren Lewis, "the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. A corner of The Eagle and Child pub, formerly the landlord's sitting-room where Lewis' friends, including Inklings members, informally gathered on Tuesday mornings.