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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 8 August 2008

Reading Room could be the focus of a real blockbuster

• BRIAN Sewell’s outrage at the sacrifice of the Reading Room at British Museum at the altar of exhibits is shared by many people, and not just Londoners (Hidden: historic Reading Room buried under blockbuster shows, July 25).
In Graham Robb’s biography of the iconic French poets, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, Verlaine describes his life in London at No 8 Royal College Street [Camden]: “The country side to the north west – Hampstead Heath – is admirable. I often go there, when I’m not in the Reading Room of the British Museum”.
The records show that on March 25 1871 his 18-year-old companion, Rimbaud, lying about his age, obtained a reader’s ticket.
There, he “sat for hours in the same fog-filled Reading Room as Karl Marx and Swinburne studying books that were unobtainable in France, (many of which are still unobtainable in France)… The British Museum was Rimbaud’s other London home. Heating lighting, pens and ink were free, the librarians could speak French and never judged readers by the state of their dress…”.
The Reading Room was a mecca not only for Russians and French philosophers and writers, but for tourists, visitors and immigrants from around the globe. Instead of closing down the Reading Room, why not mount a blockbuster exhibit focusing on it; celebrating its place in international literary, social and architectural history?
Joyce Glasser, NW3

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld.
Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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