Stoppard and the London Library
The Financial Times has a story about one of my favourite playwrights and his love for the London Library, a membership institution.
This is the place Isaiah Berlin called "easily the best library in the world". Although there are remarkable libraries that would give him a good run for that "easily", it's a place its members are passionate about. For a modest annual subscription you have access to 1m or so books, multiplying every day, in a range of European languages, mostly about literature, history and the humanities. Most unusually, you can take the books home. Although there is a high and soothing leather-armchaired reading room, the sense of going off into the everyday world with your armful of wonders - or, if you live outside London or abroad, getting your wonders through the post - is unparalleled.Even here, though, time moves on, the expectations of readers grow and books clamour to be loved and housed and ventilated. There will be a second reading room, Stoppard explains, there will be extensions below ground, computer terminals and a rationalisation of the collections. The catalogues will all be online. And there will even be a rooftop terrace ("from which you can see the London Eye," Stoppard adds, with half-murderous emphasis) - but it will all "keep the antique charm, without the formlessness".