photographing the small things in life

Today I got a reader pass for the British Library.  I am quite proud of myself.  But I will get into that in a bit.  First, we stopped in at King's Cross Station to see and take pictures of Platform 9 3/4 like every other stereotypical librarians.  We then strolled over to the British Library for a lovely tour.  In case you were unaware, the British Library is pretty hardcore.  They don't bend the rules for anyone and they measure their stacks in kilometers.  Whoa.  Perhaps the best part of the tour was when we went into the gallery which had volumes upon volumes of amazingly preserved books and manuscripts.  For me, the Sacred Texts portion of the gallery was the best by far.  Some of the volumes dated back hundreds of years.  I got my Bachelor's in Religion with a minor in Art History and wrote my senior seminar paper comparing medieval Christian illuminated manuscripts to Islamic calligraphy.  I cannot describe how awesome this exhibit was for me.  I found, however, that apparently I know Hinduism best of the major world faiths whose sacred texts were on display at the British Library.  I was able to recognize the majority of the figures and stories for the Hinduism display more than for any other faith.

As my flatmates so kindly reminded me just now, the British Library also holds the world's largest collection of pornography.  While it may seem that I would simply add this for a giggle, it is actually interesting to me because I read the book Libraries, Erotica, and Pornography for an assignment in one of my Information Studies classes (this book was not assigned, but rather we were allowed to chose our books for the assignment with professor approval).

But back to my British Library reader pass.  When Mr. Gets, a friend of the family, heard about my trip to London, he gave me a mission.  Now, Mr. Gets is British himself and apparently his grandfather, one J. L. Theodore-Getz, wrote a few books which are held at the British Library.  However, Mr. Gets thought they were at the British Museum so I had to find their true location first.  You see, some years ago, all of the books in the reading room at the British Museum were transferred to the British Library.  So, I took my mission there.  Now, Mr. Gets is quite a trouble maker so trying to ascertain what exactly he wanted from these books was a bit of a mission in itself as he rarely offers a straight answer.  Finally, I found that he wanted any biographical information that might be in his grandfather's books.  So today, I applied for and received a readers pass, requested the books, sat around for an hour to wait for them to be pulled from the stacks, and finally gleaned whatever information (of which there was little) from the books that there was.  It was all a rather intimidating process, to be honest but at least now I can say that I have a British Library reader pass (at least for the next month) and that I made use of its services.