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Magic of Beatrix Potter can be added to Reading Room
• FOLLOWING Joyce Glasser’s letter (Reading Room itself could be the focus of a blockbuster, August 7), the name of Beatrix Potter can be added to the list of those well-known people who used the Reading Room.
In a marvellous picture letter to a young friend in March 1900 she wrote: “I went to the Reading Room at the British Museum this morning to see a delightful old book full of rhymes...The Reading Room is an enormous big room, quite round, with galleries round the side walls covered with books and hundreds of chairs and desks on the floor.
“There were not many people but some of them were very funny to look at! Next time Miss Potter goes to the British Museum she will take some Keatings Powder! It is very odd there should be fleas in books!”
To mark the centenary of the first commercial publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 2002, a member of The Beatrix Potter Society read the text to a gathering of children in the Reading Room.
Displayed, together with the original watercolours of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies (owned by The British Museum), was Beatrix Potter’s Reader’s Ticket, issued in 1886.
JUDY TAYLOR
Chairwoman The Beatrix Potter Society and author of Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman, NW3
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