British Library Journal (volume 23, number 2, autumn 1997)

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English

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The Panizzi touch: Panizzi's successors as Principal Librarian
(1997-11)
Prescott, Andrew
BY 1878, Sir Anthony Panizzi was dying. His biographer Edward Miller paints an affecting picture of his condition at that time: "Almost a complete cripple, half blind, he was but the wreck of the magnificent man he had once been. All he could manage was a short drive in the afternoon, accompanied usually by the faithful Fagan and then back to Bloomsbury Square, where a lift had been installed to ease somewhat the sick man's burden."
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James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps and the British Museum Library
(1997-11)
Spevack, Marvin
IN an address on the Halliwell-Phillipps collection delivered before the Pennsylvania Library Club, at the Friends' Library, Philadelphia, on Monday, 14 January 1895, Albert H. Smyth, Professor of the English Language and Literature, Central High School, Philadelphia, no librarian and therefore 'rather reminiscent than doctrinaire', raised the curtain thus: "For several years I have been as regular in my summer visits to the British Museum as the bird that haunt the convenient corners of its Grecian front. From the day that I first walked with Richard Garnett, wittiest and most learned of librarians, in the gallery of the great reading-room and looked down upon the scholars who had come from the corners of the earth, I was made free of the learned society that makes of the library in Bloomsbury a great literary club. Lucy Toulmin Smith, the learned and industrious editor of the York Plays; Dr. Brinsley Nicholson, gentle and scholarly Shakespearian, now, alas, gone from us forever; P. A. Daniel, the best Elizabethan since Dyce, and many a foreign spirit, met every afternoon in the Museum restaurant, where we ate the worst meal in the United Kingdom and released our tongues after the forenoon's enforced silence."
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Adolphus Asher (1800-1853): Berlin bookseller, Anglophile, and friend to Panizzi
(1997-11)
Paisey, David
THE London weekly The Athenaeum of 1 October 1853 carried in its gossip column the following brief obituary: "Mr. Adolphus Asher, bookseller of Berlin, whose shop in the Linden Walk was the common rendezvous of literary natives and strangers in that capital, died at Venice on the 2nd of this month [September]. Mr. Asher was one of the continental purveyors for the British Museum, and his business brought him into frequent connexion with the leading literary men in this country; by whom he was respected for his great knowledge of books, and for his ready disposition to place the advantages of his foreign connexion at the service of those to whom it might be useful. His loss will be felt by the English literary visitor at Berlin, as that of an old and agreeable friend. He died in his fifty-third year."
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Watts, Panizzi and Asher: the development of the Russian collections 1837-1869
(1997-11)
Thomas, Christine
;
Henderson, Bob
"No doubt, for many readers it will come as a surprise to learn that, in terms of the completeness and richness of the collections, few libraries in Russia can compete with the Russian Department of the British Museum. In many respects... [it] should be placed higher than any library in Russia, even the St Petersburg Public Library." These are the words of Vladimir Burtsev (1862-1942), Russian revolutionary and historian, who came to the British Museum in the early 1890s to study English sources on his special subject. Hoping that he would not be completely deprived of Russian books, and that he might find at least some works on Russian literature there, he was amazed to discover a 'rich and well organized Russian library'. Burtsev goes on to give a lengthy and detailed description of the strengths of the collections, as well as praising the excellent service in the reading rooms. (One of his compatriots who used the reading room some ten years later - one Vladimir Il'ich Lenin - was equally complimentary.)
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The rediscovery of Margery Kempe: a footnote
(1997-11)
Kelliher, Hilton
THE year 1934 was truly an annus mirabilis for English literary studies, when over the space of three months during the summer and autumn unique manuscripts of three major works were brought to light. In July came the announcement by Walter Oakeshott of his discovery in the Fellows Library at Winchester College of a text of Le Morte d'Arthur differing in some respects from that published by Caxton in 1485, but which later proved to have been in his office at the time of printing. In August Coleridge's autograph fair copy of an early recension of Kubla Khan emerged from the Monckton Milnes collection at Crewe Hall in Derbyshire. In September a country house near Chesterfield yielded The Book of Margery Kempe, the autobiography of the fractious Norfolk mystic and pilgrim that had until then been known only from seven pages of extracts published by Wynkyn de Worde about 1501. Almost fifty years after its rediscovery the Kempe manuscript came up at public auction and was purchased by the British Library, thus becoming the last of the trio to enter the national collection.
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The dating of Seiber/Adorno papers held by the British Library
(1997-11)
Wilcock, Evelyn
THE welcome publication by Nick Chadwick of Matyas Seiber's comments on Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's jazz research proposal (the 'Expose') of January 1936 and their correspondence during the subsequent writing of Adorno's essay 'On Jazz' ('Uber Jazz') provides valuable insight into their co-operation. Seiber's assistance was publicly acknowledged by Adorno both in 1936 when he sent Seiber the proofs of the article, which included a full acknowledgement, and again in 1953 when Adorno defended himself against criticism of 'Uber Jazz' by the German jazz expert, Joachim Ernst Berendt. However, any appraisal of the extent to which Seiber influenced Adorno or persuaded him to moderate the views expressed in 'On Jazz' may be hampered by Chadwick's assumption that Sieber's comments on Adorno's jazz research proposal reached him only after 'On Jazz' had gone to press.
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The young Panizzi
(1997-11)
Foot, M. R. D.
ANTONIO PANIZZI was born on 16 September 1797 in Brescello, a small town at the junction of the Po and the Enza, a town so insignificant that it does not appear at all in the current Michelin guide to Italy. It lies in the fertile, but flat, Lombard plain. The Place must have had some influence on his character: a townsman, yet in a predominantly rural area; and, at that, a townsman in an enclave, because Brescello was part of one then independent duchy - Modena - but surrounded by the territory of another, Parma; and was constantly quarrelling over details with its still smaller immediate neighbour Boretto. Movement and controversy were all round him from the start.
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Consort and cupola: Prince Albert, Panizzi and the Reading Room of the British Museum
(1997-11)
Wright, C. J.
ON 25 October 1997 the round Reading Room of the British Museum closed its doors to readers for the last time. One hundred and forty years after it was opened Antonio Panizzi most visible achievement ceased to serve the function for which it was erected, as the chief means of public access to the national collection of printed books. There can be, therefore, no more suitable moment to reflect on how and why this remarkable room came to be built and what this tells us in passing about both Panizzi and his contemporaries. Among these contemporaries not the least prominent was the Prince Consort and Panizzi, who, whatever his other faults, never undervalued himself, would surely consider it appropriate that he should be discussed in such exalted company.
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Panizzi, Grenville and the Grenville Library
(1997-11)
Reidy, Denis V.
ANTONIO PANIZZI arrived in England in May 1823 'with not quite a sovereign in his pocket, knowing no one, nor a word of the language' as he was later to write. The liberal attitudes of the English especially regarding political, intellectual and religious tolerance and freedom, so much appreciated by Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques in the eighteenth century, had effectively transformed the English capital into a virtual Mecca for exiles, especially for political exiles, by the nineteenth. Countless numbers of them from all over the world - the Venezuelan patriot and statesman Andres Bello is perhaps one of the most famous - chose to spend the period of their exile in the liberal atmosphere of London, at that period arguably the most powerful and wealthiest capital in the world. The large contingent of Italian political exiles included Ugo Foscolo, Gabriele Rossetti, the father of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Giuseppe Pecchio, Giovanni Arrivabene, Santorre di Santa Rosa and eventually Giuseppe Mazzini, who was later to edit and launch his celebrated journal Giovine Italia working in the British Museum Library. Indeed there were so many political exiles in London in the 1820s that it was extremely difficult for many to find gainful employment. When Panizzi went to visit Ugo Foscolo, the greatest Italian poet of his generation, who was living at the time with his illegitimate daughter Floriana in Digamma Cottage in Regent's Park, Foscolo advised Panizzi not to remain in London but to travel to, and attempt to settle in, Liverpool.
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British Library Journal (volume 23, number 2, autumn 1997)

British Library Journal (volume 23, number 2, autumn 1997)

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