Book review: The Library suggests our love affair with books is likely to go on
The Reading Room at the British Museum in London in 1937. Predictions of libraries’ demise now seem far-fetched. Picture: Fox Photos/Getty Images
I LEFT the Museum Tavern in London and crossed the road to the British Museum which back then incorporated the British Library, with its magnificent round reading room. I sat at a desk as I awaited delivery of a copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psycopathia Sexualis (the sort of medical textbook, as Time magazine once noted, that librarians once kept locked away). Back in the Museum Tavern afterwards, it suddenly dawned on me that I might have sat at a desk once occupied by Karl Marx or George Bernard Shaw, frequent users.
Years later I was taken on a (partial) tour of the Vatican Library, organised by a kindly Irish Dominican who was one of the main librarians. Along the way, I was shown a fourth century fragment of St Mark’s Gospel.
