British Library

This picture pretty much sums up how I feel about the British Library. I visited for the first time last summer. My best laid plans to explore the library were thwarted by an extensive Henry VIII exhibition that I wrongly thought would only take me an hour. One year later, I have no regrets.

The British Library branched out of the British Museum and became the legal deposit library of the U.K. and Ireland in 1973. It may have the largest collection in the world, touting 200 million items. Then again, the Library of Congress, Bibliotheque Nationale of France, and the Russian State Library are also contenders. As our tour guide clarified, national libraries grow at exponential rates, so it is hard to say one is the biggest.

Such an important library must be run with caution. Anyone desiring to use the reading rooms must prove genuine need. It does not have to be PhD level need. An elderly man wanted to look at a book he remembered from his childhood. That was enough. However, if he had wanted to look at Shakespeare's 1st folio he likely would have been turned down. The system of records and barcoding led to the catching of a book vandal. A man who smuggled in a knife and cut pages out of books was sentenced to 2 years in prison. He was a top researcher in his field.

While I expected that the library would house manuscripts, periodicals, maps, and even patents, I would have never guessed they had the ashes of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The story from our guide is that someone took a handful from his cremation site in Italy. Why this happened and how the British Library obtained the physical remnants of the French Revolution obsessed Romantic poet remains to be discovered. I am on it.

There are too many treasures in the Treasures of the British Library to do the collection justice. I am going to note just a few of the most interesting to me (not necessarily the most interesting to the anyone else):

• Beowulf. This copy from Cotton's collection was saved from a fire by a servant. It is charred.
  
• J.G. Ballard Archive. So now we know the claim that Ballard did not keep archives was a lie. The recently deceased British author kept documents relating to his experiences in WWII, including a map of the Internment camp in which he and his family were held. On display is evidence he heavily edited and rewrote his works. There are pages from his manuscripts filled with illegible (at least to me) words and lines in red and blue ink. An ink-filled page is one of the more visceral windows into brilliance.


• A letter by Charles Darwin where he asserts he is "confident in the truth of my main doctrine." For the record, I can read no one's handwriting. I know what the letter says because of signage. Darwin is not even the worst offender.
  
• The diary of Robert Falcon Scott and photos from his ill-fated polar expedition. When he learned that Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten him to the South Pole he wrote that it was "a horrible day" and went on to express his correct fear that he and his own crew would not survive.

Image of "The Funeral of Shelley" by Fournier is from the National Museums Liverpool website.
Image of Ballard manuscript from bibliokept.org.
Image of Scott's Journal from British Library online gallery.