It's spitting rain and windy today in London as we visit the Victoria & Albert Museum, also known as the V&A. We got to go into the National Library, which was very lovely! The museum is one of the 4 largest art museums in the world with 30,000 visitors a year and rising. The library was founded in 1837 and actually predates the museum as a whole. They collect international material in a number of languages for use by the public and the staff for their own research. They have some pretty cool items, such as 3 of Leonardo Da Vinci's journals (which are, obviously, under top secret care and we were not allowed to see them)
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| It's official--I NEED a two-story open room library in my future home. |
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| We got to go up to the second floor balcony here and it was just as amazing as you'd expect! |
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| This is a 1560 manuscript from Italy. It's a writing manual and has every script that was known at the time. |
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| Lane's Telescopic view of the ceremony of Her Majesty opening the Great Exhibition of all nations. This is called a peep show and it is from the 19th century. It opens up (see next photo) and is very cool--you look in through the hole on the front and get to see a lovely view. |
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| Wordpharmacy, 2013. An example of book art. They have the largest collection in the UK--5,000 items. Book art plays with the concept of what a book is. It asks if you can find a narrative or story in a different way than the typical book. This one has parts of speech as medicine--medicine, like words, can be positive, but also can grow a dependency. This challenges us to find new ways to say things and not get stuck in the same path. |
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| They had their own in-house classification system! Like some other libraries we've seen, they organize their books by height (which adds room for an additional 60,000 books!). Each space has a number and letter attached to it, and then each individual book is numbered. I find this fascinating! Book shelved by height only would probably drive me mad, but they are so organized that it can't be too bad. |
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