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Reading Room could itself be the focus of a blockbuster
• BRIAN Sewell’s outrage at the sacrifice of the Reading Room at British Museum at the altar of exhibits is shared by many people, and not just Londoners (Hidden: historic Reading Room buried under blockbuster shows, July 24).
In Graham Robb’s remarkable biography of the iconic French poets, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, Verlaine describes his life in London at No 8 Royal College Street in Camden Town: “The countryside to the north west [Hampstead Heath] is admirable. I often go there, when I’m not in the Reading Room of the British Museum”. The records show that on March 25, 1871, his 18-year-old companion, Arthur Rimbaud, lying about his age, obtained a reader’s ticket.
There, he “sat for hours in the same fog-filled Reading Room as Karl Marx and Swinburne studying books that were unobtainable in France, (many of which are still unobtainable in France) and some of the literary and sub-literary works mentioned in Une Saison en Enfer [Rimbaud’s great prose poem]. The British Museum was Rimbaud’s other London home. Heating lighting, pens and ink were free, the librarians could speak French and never judged readers by the state of their dress and a moderately priced restaurant made it possible to survive ten-hour strength of reading.”
The Reading Room was a mecca not only for Russians and French philosophers and writers, but for tourists, visitors and immigrants from around the globe. Instead of closing down the Reading Room, why not mount a blockbuster exhibit focusing on it; celebrating its place in international literary, social and architectural history? Could there be a more fitting cultural tie-in to the Olympics?
JOYCE GLASSER
, NW3
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