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, british, museum, reading and/or room:
“When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“If this creature is a murderer, then so are we all. This snake has killed one British soldier; we have killed many. This is not murder, gentlemen. This is war.”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“I loved reading, and had a great desire of attaining knowledge; but whenever I asked questions of any kind whatsoever, I was always told, “such things were not proper for girls of my age to know.”... For “Miss must not enquire too far into things, it would turn her brain; she had better mind her needlework, and such things as were useful for women; reading and poring on books would never get me a husband.””
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)