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When reading about the Time Traveller's exploits in HG Wells' The Time Machine I was excited when he refered to the museums as "South Kensington!" Today I got to chance to ask Deobroah about where the library was before the building was built, and it turns out it was here, we got to check a 1870 report, where they complained about lack of space for books! It was very cool. And she said that it must have been the inspiration for the library in the The Time Machine. This is the description of the books from chapter 8,
I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the philosophical transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.
Yesterday I got counter training and I start my week day work this Tuesday, when apparently Simon Schuma is coming in to do a bit of research. I feel so lucky!
I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the philosophical transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.
Yesterday I got counter training and I start my week day work this Tuesday, when apparently Simon Schuma is coming in to do a bit of research. I feel so lucky!