Romanticism

Excitement at the British Library last night: All of a sudden the PA system went into overdrive and the same automated voice that booms “the reading rooms will soon be closing” repeatedly told the building manager to “report to reception immediately”. Then the fire alarm went on, then off, then on again and a security guard shouted “evacuate the building!” while the siren continued to scream. So we all got up and made for the front door of the reading room but another guard shouted “the backstairs!” and we were led down a hidden passageway. If a crook had been plotting to rip pages out of a valuable book and sell them on the black market, now would have been his golden moment.

Outside in the cold, library staff handed out thermal silver foil body wraps and we all huddled together.

I got talking to two academics from the States, one of whom was a professor with a special interest in romanticism. As Ayn Rand was on my mind from these blog posts I asked him his thoughts on the Romantic Manifesto. He said he thought Ayn was a fascist - or a phase you go through when you're a teenager. He said he and Ayn approached romanticism from opposite directions. So there you have it: Ayn Rand, the rational supremacist oozing contempt.
But just watch this clip of Ayn talking about her husband as interviewer Mike Wallace smokes his cigarette:

http://tinyurl.com/nzx479

Anyhow, the fire brigade arrived and after about 10 minutes another voice, a live one this time, came over the outdoor PA system and said we would soon be able to go back in. It turned out there was smoke issuing from a lift because of an electrical fault.

I kept the silver cape and took it home with me.

Geek Alert

The British Library has published an online archive of 49 British national and regional titles from the 19th and early 20th century.

The Guardian reports today that events such as the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, the bank crisis of 1878 and the first FA cup final in 1872 can be rediscovered among more than two million pages which went online today: http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs

At the bottom of the article (http://tinyurl.com/nknweq), journalist Maev Kennedy, carried away by the good news, chirps: “Searches are free, but users can pay to download information.”

Shouldn’t that be, “Searches are free, but users must pay to download information”?

Anyone wishing to avoid paying can just pop up (or down) to the British Library Newspapers Reading Room in Colindale and read it all for free on micofiche. And microfiche is more fun.

Library Protocol

Here is a snippet of the conversation I had with one of the two security guards on the door to Humanities 1 at The British Library today:

Security Guard: "You can't take that handcream into the library because you might smear it on our books and the repair work costs thousands of pounds.
Me: "I'm not here to smear handcream on to the books, I am here to read them."
Security Guard (grunts and, with no glint of humour in his eyes, says): "Yeah well, someone might say they want to take a machine gun into the library, but they aren't going to use it."
Me (bewildered): "Excuse me?"
Security Guard (sighs): "If you use the handcream make sure you rub it into your hands before coming back into the reading room."
Me: (I was walking off by this point.)

Unbelievable. I guess the British Library is still reeling from the news that it has managed to "mislay" 9,000 books.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/17/british-library-books-mein-kampf

The irony for me was that in the book I came to read at the BL today, there was a sentence in which the author declared she had taken a book she was sent and did not want to read and submerged it in water.

Cue the resurfacing of the idea of waterproof books!