London: Dec 3: British Library

On Friday afternoon, December 3, 2010, I stopped by the British Library to explore its displays. In effect, it's not just a library but also a museum with exhibits on old books, on famous books, and about language. In the two and a half hours I spent in the library this afternoon, I finished most of it except for the large special exhibit on the English language. I only managed to spend forty-five minutes in the English exhibit. I returned the following day, a Saturday, and spent another two hours at the English exhibit, finishing it completely. Rather than divide my impressions of British Library over two blog posts, I'll describe everything in this post.

I took some photos on this excursion.

The British Library's permanent display has an incredible quantity of old works. I especially enjoyed the hand-written ones; they feel intimate. Items on display included:

• old books, including Shakespeare's first folio (and similarly old books about Shakespeare's works) and a book of fonts from 1500.
• old letters (in original hand-writing) by famous people such as Darwin, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf.
• illuminated manuscripts, mostly religious but from a variety of faiths and from all over the world.
• sheet music in books from the 15th century and later. Some of these, including Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Ravel, have annotations hand-written by the composer.
• maps from every century over past millennium.
• original copies of the Magna Carta. (There was no canonical version.)
• Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts.
• various illustrations of Alice in Wonderland--I didn't know so many different people illustrated this text--including one by Salvador Dali.
• Auburn's huge book of birds. When I say huge, I mean it: the birds are drawn life-sized! (Pages measure 100 x 67 centimeters, more than 3 feet by 2 feet.)

A multimedia display, Turning the Pages, allows one to flip through digital copies of all the pages of many works on display rather than only view the pages each physical book in the display cabinet happens to be open to. I flipped through some of Leonardo's manuscripts.

The British Library also has a huge philatelic collection. Given the number of sliding cases, I can believe its claim that it's the best and most comprehensive collection of stamps in the world. As support, it appears to have every country stamp issued from 1840 to 1890. I looked at and read about some of the collection's stamps, including some stamps from countries that no longer exist (e.g., Bechuanaland, the Confederate States of America). Many stamps on display are rare--many labels I read say that less than ten copies are known to exist, or even that no other instances of the stamp are known to have survived.

There was a small exhibit on how the library conserves books (rebinding, etc.) and recordings (tapes, etc.).

I walked by a special exhibit on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was roped-off, so I saw what I could (a little). I only mention this exhibit to give a further sense of the kind of exhibits the British Library tends to have.

I spent a large chunk of time over the course of two days in the special exhibit on the evolution of English. Wide ranging, it started from the Germanic and Scandinavian migrations to England and traced English through the evolution to Old and Middle English. There were old books, including early dictionaries (Caudrey's, Johnson's), an early edition of The Canterbury Tales, and a 1440 cookbook.

One section showed books from the last two centuries describing how pronunciation reflects social class. It was an interesting presentation, and interesting to see how this changed over time.

Actually, large parts of the special exhibit explored pronunciation, dialect, and word choice. For instance, there were recordings of how Shakespeare's works would've been pronounced in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. In addition, I found a copy of the BBC pronunciation guide, and learned that George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion / My Fair Lady) helped establish the committee for this. There were also recordings of people talking about expressions. I found this part great because I enjoyed hearing people's accents and manner of speaking. This multimedia display also had songs sung in different English dialects: Caribbean, Nigerian, Valley (as in San Fernando valley, Southern California), Appalachian, etc. Another multimedia display had more entertainment value: it showed a series of television skits that played with language (e.g., Abbott and Costello's baseball skit, Monty Python's argument sketch) from different eras. My favorite skit in this line-up was by a group I never heard of it. The sketch is The Two Ronnies spoof of Mastermind. The guy answers not the most recent question but the one before it, yet the answer is often incredibly funny when applied to the most recent question. Good scripting, brilliant and witty.

Another section looked at the creation of words and phrases, and included a list of common expressions that came about from their appearance in the St. James Bible (which, incidentally, was on display). But, this section didn't simply cover old words; there was a bit of information on modern text messaging.

Other sections looked at language used in propaganda, and at the evolution of poetry.

Other things I spotted worth noting:

• the riot act actually exists. It's Great Britain's The Riot Act of 1715. It's meant for dispersing groups; once the riot act has been read to the crowd, the group must disperse within the hour under penalty of law. Incidentally, the sign explaining this in the exhibit accompanied a big newsprint-like poster that reads: "THE RIOT ACT HAS BEEN READ."
• Alaric Watts' alphabet poetry
• the library has a copy of the original "It was a dark and stormy night" book, and described the author's background and how the phrase evolved into its current meaning.

In the evening, Di Yin and I had planned to go to Betsy Smith, our local pub, but we discovered it was really loud so we redirected ourselves to our local Indian standby, Spice Grill. I had sag aloo, which was good and also spicy. Di Yin had chicken kirahi, which was also good and in fact better than I remember when I had it before. Roti were good as usual. Sorry I forgot to bring my camera to dinner.