British Museum Library

When first embarking on his study of economics, in 1851, Marx wrote to Engels, I am so far advanced that in five weeks I will be through with the whole economic shit (McLellan 1973 283). As it turned out, he was to spend the next twenty-five years in the British Museum Library, defining a whole school of thought the school of classical economics. 

That s the Encyclopaedia Brittanica on the head of a pin, but let s consider all the books in the world. The Library of Congress has approximately 9 million volumes the British Museum Library has 5 million volumes there are also 5 million volumes in the National Library in Lrance. Undoubtedly there are duplications, so let us say that there are some 24 million volumes of interest in the world. 

The main national libraries in Great Britain are the Science Museum Library, the National Lending Library for Science and Technology, and the Patent Office Library. The British Museum Library while being primarily a reference library for the humanities also has a considerable amount of scientific material. In the United... 

Archivists and librarians have helped me in many ways, especially in the Australian National University the Australian National Library the Biblio-theque nationale de France the Bibliotheque de L Arsenal the Archives Nationales the British Library the British Museum the Bodleian Library, Oxford the Ashmolean Library, Oxford Torre Abbey, Torquay the Huntington Library, California the Archivio de Pesaro the Staat Archivs in Basel and the Bibliotheque de la ville de Strasbourg. 

Although the only copy of Rutherford s thesis which Sir William Ramsay was able to find is in the British Museum, Dr, Leonard Dobbin found a copy of it in the Edinburgh University Library and has published Crum Biown s English translation of it in the Journal of Chemical Education (40). Although Ramsay stated in the first edition of The Gases of the Atmosphere that this dissertation "precedes Priestley s and Scheele s writings by a year or two, he collected this in the second edition to read ... 

The published catalogues of the British Museum and of the TJ. S. Surgeon General s libraries contain no edition of the Pharmacopoea "earlier than 1700. 

All but a dozen or so of the publications mentioned have been seen by the. author. Among the libraries which have been used are those of the British Museum and Patent Office in London, of the Universities of Cambridge London, and Manchester, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, some Departs mental Libraries in Cambridge, the Chemical and Geological Societies in London, and in the case of Russian publications the Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the U.S.S.R., in London. The staffs of all the libraries have, without exception, rendered the most willing, courteous, and expert assistance to the author, and he cannot adequately thank them for this. 

Volume 1, Academies, lists academy publications in the library of the British Museum prior to 1885. Volume 41, Periodical Publications, includes periodicals prior to 1900. Listing is by place of issue, with sublisting by societies. 

The nearest thing to an international collection of dissertations is at the Biblioth ue Nationale, Paris. It is a very large one which is the result of an exchange system operated by the Ministry of Education of France. This collection, and the ones in the government libraries at Washington, D. C., the British Museum, and Oxford University, England, are the most important of the international but incomplete collections of dissertations... 

The resistance of copper to corrosion renders copper particularly valuable for water tanks and pipes, cooking utensils, sheathing of ships, etc. It possesses many advantages over lead for the covering of domes and other outdoor structures. It was used in a temple frieze at A1 Ubaid (Plate 1), near the ancient city of Ur of the Chaldees, Abraham s reputed city, some 3000 to 4000 b.c., worked up from sheet copper, and has been used by numerous peoples for like purposes ever since. The dome of the Library of the British Museum, London, dating back to 1857, is the largest copper-covered dome in the world. St Paul s Cathedral is lead-covered Wren would have preferred copper, but his workmen appear to have been unequal to the task (p. 195). Copper possesses... 

See JohnP. Cutts, British Museum Additional MS. 31342 William Lawes writing for the theatre and the court , The Library, 5th series, 7 (1952), pp. 225-34. 

De Candolle, A. P. (1798). First article on the method of nutrition of lichens. J. Phys. Chem. Hist. Natur. 47, 107-116 English translation by D. E. M. Richardson, British Museum (Natur. Hist.), Library, London. 

The Science Museum Library in South Kensington has a long history but its loan service is of more recent date. Its collection of material on the history of science and technology is of great importance. Total holdings of periodicals number about 25,000 of which over 10,000 are current. The library is an official depository for British patent specifications and atomic energy reports. Its stock, which approaches half a million volumes, is... 

Published between 1885 and 1905, Thomson reproduced at least ten of Lead s works, which were hand copied in cyclostyle from originals held in the British Museum and possibly also in other libraries. During this same period, Thomson also printed conventional movable typeset and bound reprints of works by well-known theosophers with whom Lead is often grouped, including Jacob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg,... 

Michael Hunter, Elias Ashmole, 161J—1692 The Founder of the Ashmolean Museum and his World (Oxford, 1983), reprinted in Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth Century Britain (Wbodbridge, 1995), 21—44 Josten, Ashmole, i. 210 iii. 1208 iv. 1454—5,1809. Most of these MSS are now in the Ashmole collection in the Bodleian, though it is unclear why some of Ashmoles papers, particularly those containing magical material, are now in the Sloane Collection in the British Library. 

BASF AkticngeseUschaft, 188 Carnegie-Mellon University, 54 Clemson University, 13 Getty Conservation Institute, 108 Library of Congress, 63 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 134 North Carolina State University, 94 Textile Museum, 168 The British Library, 34... 

The Diamond Sutra is 1200 years old and is particularly valuable because it was the first ever printed book. It is a scroll five metres long and is dated in a way that corresponds to 11 May 868 AD. It was one of a large library of scrolls stored in a cave near Dunhuang, China, which had been sealed sometime before 1025 and was rediscovered by a Taoist priest Wang Yuan-lu who became its self-appointed guardian. He showed the collection to the British explorer Sir Mark Aurel Stein in 1907, who was allowed to remove 7,000 of the scrolls, which he sent to London. This was only a fraction of the library and today there are parts of it to be found in museums around the world including 10,000 items in the National Library of China in Beijing. 

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