BRITISH MUSEUM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 December 1938, Page 6

BRITISH MUSEUM

Q “NEW” READING ROOMS CHANGESOF A CENTURY. IMPROVEMENTS IN LIGHTING. “New reading rooms” have been opened at the British Museum. The rooms, it was stated by the “Observer,” “form part of the north side of the quadrangle, and communicate with the Royal Library, the collection of books brought from Buckingham House, and presented to the museum by George the Fourth.” Macaulay and those other famous readers who once occupied the “comfortably stuffed chairs,” and who made good use of the freshly supplied blot-ting-books, would not recognise the place as it is today. Within the last two years the rooms —set apart for the museum staff since 1857 —have been rebuilt, their lofty ceilings lowered, their windows entirely altered, and their old bookcases replaced by steel. Prints, however, show one the aspect of the “new” rooms of 1838, with a gallery running around them at half their height, with books covering the walls from floor to roof, and with 24 tables for readers, 12 tables in each room. The readers had plenty of pens and ink; there were bookstands and paper-knives on their desks, and at last they had no longer to dry wet ink by sprinkling sand upon it. Lighting and ventilation were bad; and the lighting, indeed, hardly deserved the name. There were windows in the gallery on two sides of one room and one side of the other; but, even at three in the afternoon it was often very difficult to see. There had been a Reading Room at the Museum since January 15, 1759, when eight readers received tickets for a. dark, narrow apartment in Montagu House, equipped with “ a proper wainscot table covered with green bays.’ Ten years later a new room was opened above the old, and in 1803 and again in 1817 the Trustees found additional accommodation. WOMEN PIONEERS. . Many eminent readers used the rooms. Gibbon went there, and so did Burke. Scott made researches there, Lamb and Robert Southey were among the visitors. Although in the first years of the Nineteenth Century “it was not considered etiquette for ladies to study in the library of the British Museum,” Lady Mary Carr and Lady Ann Monson had been admitted as early as January 1, 1762. The old quarters—the “spacious chamber surrounded with great cases of venerable books,” where such people as Carlyle, Fitzgerald and Dickens worked —became over-crowded. On September 8, 1838, the new rooms, communicating with the Royal Library, opened their doors and the old rooms were “appropriated for the reception .of manuscripts.” f Only 19 years passed before the next and the most historic change. Anthony Panrzzi, Keeper of Printed Books, designed the present magnificent Rotunda capped by a dome larger than any in Europe except that of the Pantheon at Rome. The Museum buildings at that time surrounded a quadrangle and the vast new Reading Room was set m.the middle of this space. Books filled the four “angles.”

Today the appearance of the Rotunda, opened on May 2, 1857. has altered very little. The desks and tables still radiate .like the spokes of a wheel, between 70.000 and 80,000. volumes cover the walls up to the clerestory, the dome lifts its canopy far above, there is a continual ebb-and-flow about the catalogues, and among the bookshelves attendants maintain their perpetual search.

The “angles” outside the Rotunda, in which hundreds of thousands of books are stored, are being rebuilt. In one steel fittings have already replaced the cast-iron shelves, and in another the old shelves stand empty, and all is ready for the builders. The ReadingRoom was the first large cast-iron building in the world; its lower section is, as it were, a skeleton walled with books between the cast-iron “ribs.” It may lake 10 years before the present extension scheme is completed.

The list of eminent readers who have used the room is very long. It includes such names as Matthew Arnold. Samuel Butler. Thomas Hardy, W. E. Gladstone, Henry Irving, Leslie Stephen, Charles Bradlaugh. Here, one day in the eighties, a man who had asked for a book containing formulae for raising the Devil invited the superintendent to read an incantation there and then. The superintendent, it is recalled, answered tactfully that the Archbishop of Canterbury was one of the trustees and might not approve of the proceedings. FOUR MILLION BOOKS. Today there are nearly 4,000,000 books on the shelves. They increase at the rate of 50,000 annually, and there are rarely fewer than 4000 entries in the monthly list of acquisitions. The room holds 460 persons; the daily, average of readers exceeds 700 and shows signs of increasing. Between 170 and 180 years ago fewer than 150 tickets were granted annually. Last week hundreds of earnest students were working as usual in that curious Reading Room hush. Assuredly their predecessors who had sat at the oaken tables of the cramped and musty “new” rooms of 1838 must have echoed these words of Thackeray’s, written five years after the Rotunda opened:— “I have seen all sorts of domes of Peters and Pauls. Sophia. Pantheon — what Not? —and have been struck by none of them so much as by that catholic dome in Bloomsbury, under which our million volumes are housed . . . It seems to me I cannot sit down in that place without a heart full of grateful reverence.”