The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, London, but the Reading Room remains in its original form inside the new British Museum. Designed by Sydney Smirke on a suggestion by the Library's Chief Librarian Anthony Panizzi, following an earlier competition idea by William Hosking, the Reading Room was in continual use from 1857 until its temporary closure in 1997.
Read more about British Museum Reading Room: Construction and Design, Famous Readers, Current Use, References in Art and Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words british, museum, reading and/or room:
“There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous—secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will—we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books ... we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Soaked by the sparkling waters of America.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2740, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“They don’t advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex- blade runner. Ex-killer.”
—David Webb Peoples, U.S. screenwriter, and Ridley Scott. Rick Deckard, Blade Runner, reading the newspaper—his opening lines (1982)
“I cannot halt
The tread, the beat of it, it is my own heart,
The walls of my room rise, it is still night,
I have woken again before the word was spelt.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)