Bibliophile Paradise

We visited the British Library (BL) yesterday, and I don't think our lives will ever be the same. If we hadn't been in a library, I'm sure there would have been band groupie-like squealing and screaming.

The BL is a fantastically varied institution. It holds over 150 million items, in the form of manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, prints and drawings, music scores, and patents. And it's growing at a rate of three million items per year (it receives a copy of every new publication produced in the UK and Ireland).

The bench shown in the photo above is a sculpture (and actually a bench in practice, too) of an old-school chained book. Access to the fantastic collections at the BL is put into stark contrast with the libraries of the past. Books were expensive: the pages were made with animal skins (vellum), and the writing alone would take years to complete for a Bible (by scribes, monks, etc). So libraries shackled the books to the shelves (think Harry Potter Restricted Section), setting up reading stands for users that were just within reach of the chains.

We found out that the BL requires multiple visits. Their permanent exhibition holds some of the gems of the collection, amazing to see (for free!): Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Folios of Shakespeare... Oh, and they have free podcasts available on the website: Magnificent Maps (current exhibit), Henry VIII, From Parchment to Pixel, what have you. If you see five items each day, it would take you over 80,000 years to see the whole of the collection. I'm off to start work on a philosopher's stone, but if anyone out there has any leads on a fountain of youth or elixir of life, do let me know!

Helpful English Hint of the Post: Considering the weather we've been having lately, you should know that 'brolly' is short for 'umbrella' and 'mac' is short for 'macintosh' (a raincoat). Also, if someone says it's 'pissing it down', that's equivalent to 'raining cats and dogs'.