#rosettastone — Public Fediverse posts

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Abyss 🕳️ (Dark ambient, neofolk, shoegaze, immersive)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - Tomorrow for Us

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https://lesonduvortex.net

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#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #PostPunk #90s

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Abyss 🕳️ (Dark ambient, neofolk, shoegaze, immersive)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - The Witch

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
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#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Darkwave #90s

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Abyss 🕳️ (Dark ambient, neofolk, shoegaze, immersive)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - Tomorrow for Us

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
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#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Post-Punk #90s

Oh, *bravo*! 🎩✨ Apparently, all it takes to master the Japanese language is a deck of Magic cards and a browser error message. Who needs Rosetta Stone when you have cookies and JavaScript? 🍪🔮
https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/how-magic-the-gathering-took-me-from-n2-to-japanese-fluency #magiccards #japaneselearning #browsererror #rosettastone #javascript #HackerNews #ngated

Oh, *bravo*! 🎩✨ Apparently, all it takes to master the Japanese language is a deck of Magic cards and a browser error message. Who needs Rosetta Stone when you have cookies and JavaScript? 🍪🔮
https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/how-magic-the-gathering-took-me-from-n2-to-japanese-fluency #magiccards #japaneselearning #browsererror #rosettastone #javascript #HackerNews #ngated

Oh, *bravo*! 🎩✨ Apparently, all it takes to master the Japanese language is a deck of Magic cards and a browser error message. Who needs Rosetta Stone when you have cookies and JavaScript? 🍪🔮
https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/how-magic-the-gathering-took-me-from-n2-to-japanese-fluency #magiccards #japaneselearning #browsererror #rosettastone #javascript #HackerNews #ngated

Oh, *bravo*! 🎩✨ Apparently, all it takes to master the Japanese language is a deck of Magic cards and a browser error message. Who needs Rosetta Stone when you have cookies and JavaScript? 🍪🔮
https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/how-magic-the-gathering-took-me-from-n2-to-japanese-fluency #magiccards #japaneselearning #browsererror #rosettastone #javascript #HackerNews #ngated

Oh, *bravo*! 🎩✨ Apparently, all it takes to master the Japanese language is a deck of Magic cards and a browser error message. Who needs Rosetta Stone when you have cookies and JavaScript? 🍪🔮
https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/how-magic-the-gathering-took-me-from-n2-to-japanese-fluency #magiccards #japaneselearning #browsererror #rosettastone #javascript #HackerNews #ngated

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Abyss 🕳️ (Dark ambient, neofolk, shoegaze, immersive)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - Tomorrow for Us

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/d82hJZBeDE

#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Post-Punk #90s

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Abyss 🕳️ (Dark ambient, neofolk, shoegaze, immersive)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - Tomorrow for Us

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/d82hJZBeDE

#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Post-Punk #90s

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Dawn 🌅 (Neoclassical, ambient, soft post-rock)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - Tomorrow for Us

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/d82hJZBeDE

#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Darkwave #90s

200 years on from the deciphering of the most famous piece of rock in the world, what does reading the #RosettaStone reveal?

⌛️ Last chance to read this archive article for free

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/original-rock-star

200 years on from the deciphering of the most famous piece of rock in the world, what does reading the #RosettaStone reveal?

⌛️ Last chance to read this archive article for free

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/original-rock-star

200 years on from the deciphering of the most famous piece of rock in the world, what does reading the #RosettaStone reveal?

⌛️ Last chance to read this archive article for free

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/original-rock-star

200 years on from the deciphering of the most famous piece of rock in the world, what does reading the #RosettaStone reveal?

⌛️ Last chance to read this archive article for free

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/original-rock-star

200 years on from the deciphering of the most famous piece of rock in the world, what does reading the #RosettaStone reveal?

⌛️ Last chance to read this archive article for free

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/original-rock-star

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Dawn 🌅 (Neoclassical, ambient, soft post-rock)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - Adrenaline

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/d82hJZBeDE

#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Darkwave #90s

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Dawn 🌅 (Neoclassical, ambient, soft post-rock)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - Adrenaline

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/d82hJZBeDE

#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Darkwave #90s

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Abyss 🕳️ (Dark ambient, neofolk, shoegaze, immersive)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - The Witch

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/d82hJZBeDE

#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Darkwave #90s

🔴 LIVE NOW ON VORTEX
📻 Vortex Abyss 🕳️ (Dark ambient, neofolk, shoegaze, immersive)
──────────────
🎵 Rosetta Stone - The Witch

▶️ Écouter / Listen : VorteX [Radio]
https://lesonduvortex.net

💬 Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/d82hJZBeDE

#VortexWave #RosettaStone #GothicRock #Darkwave #90s

ROSETTA STONE - Cimmerian
https://youtu.be/nFRvNUXfLgM?si=FqsD4T9Y8KB7iR5u

#gothicrock #RosettaStone #porlking

ROSETTA STONE - Cimmerian
https://youtu.be/nFRvNUXfLgM?si=FqsD4T9Y8KB7iR5u

#gothicrock #RosettaStone #porlking

ROSETTA STONE - Cimmerian
https://youtu.be/nFRvNUXfLgM?si=FqsD4T9Y8KB7iR5u

#gothicrock #RosettaStone #porlking

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Rosetta Stone Offering $200 ‘Lifetime’ Learning Deal As New Year’s Resolutions Kick Off

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://variety.com/2025/shopping/news/rosetta-stone-deal-1235631663/

@mathaetaes

So much for #duolingo

maybe #Pimsleur , #RosettaStone or ThomasMann are better

I never wanted to learn Korean anyways
:bun:

@mathaetaes

So much for #duolingo

maybe #Pimsleur , #RosettaStone or ThomasMann are better

I never wanted to learn Korean anyways
:bun:

@mathaetaes

So much for #duolingo

maybe #Pimsleur , #RosettaStone or ThomasMann are better

I never wanted to learn Korean anyways
:bun:

@mathaetaes

So much for #duolingo

maybe #Pimsleur , #RosettaStone or ThomasMann are better

I never wanted to learn Korean anyways
:bun:

Looking for language learning suggestions: family member has used Duolingo for years, gave them family license to get rid of ads, but then Duolingo fired most of staff and switched to AI inaccuracies

It's a decent service if you want to speak to a robot owl, but getting ever more incorrect

Platforms or the people learning are Linux and Android

Self-hosting not an option at this time

Looking for to/from European languages for now

#LanguageLearning #Duolingo #Babbel #RosettaStone

1/

Looking for language learning suggestions: family member has used Duolingo for years, gave them family license to get rid of ads, but then Duolingo fired most of staff and switched to AI inaccuracies

It's a decent service if you want to speak to a robot owl, but getting ever more incorrect

Platforms or the people learning are Linux and Android

Self-hosting not an option at this time

Looking for to/from European languages for now

#LanguageLearning #Duolingo #Babbel #RosettaStone

1/

Looking for language learning suggestions: family member has used Duolingo for years, gave them family license to get rid of ads, but then Duolingo fired most of staff and switched to AI inaccuracies

It's a decent service if you want to speak to a robot owl, but getting ever more incorrect

Platforms or the people learning are Linux and Android

Self-hosting not an option at this time

Looking for to/from European languages for now

#LanguageLearning #Duolingo #Babbel #RosettaStone

1/

Looking for language learning suggestions: family member has used Duolingo for years, gave them family license to get rid of ads, but then Duolingo fired most of staff and switched to AI inaccuracies

It's a decent service if you want to speak to a robot owl, but getting ever more incorrect

Platforms or the people learning are Linux and Android

Self-hosting not an option at this time

Looking for to/from European languages for now

#LanguageLearning #Duolingo #Babbel #RosettaStone

1/

Looking for language learning suggestions: family member has used Duolingo for years, gave them family license to get rid of ads, but then Duolingo fired most of staff and switched to AI inaccuracies

It's a decent service if you want to speak to a robot owl, but getting ever more incorrect

Platforms or the people learning are Linux and Android

Self-hosting not an option at this time

Looking for to/from European languages for now

#LanguageLearning #Duolingo #Babbel #RosettaStone

1/

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https://trl.cldtraflink.com/click?pid=1305&offer_id=2814
Rosetta Stone WW
Rosetta Stone has been the most trusted name in language learning for over 25 years, offering effective, expert-crafted courses in 25+ languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Arabic.
Discover amazing deals on Rosetta Stone's language plans. Learn Spanish, German, French, and more! Perfect for this holiday season!
#LanguageLearning #HolidayDeals #RosettaStone #MultiLanguage #SpecialOffers
Region : Worldwide

For the past 60 days, I have been intensively studying the Italian language. I want to learn Italian in order to better serve our ASL Opera project since 50% of the most popular operas were written in Italian (25% were written in German, and 15% were written in French). I understand modern Italian isn’t the same as “original opera Italian” — but learning something new only helps deepen the appreciation of the comprehension of the context of the original aesthetic. In this article, I will share with you some of the treasures, and techniques, I have been using to apply a greater understanding to my Italian learning.

Learning a new language can be a challenge. When I first met my beloved Janna more than 35 years ago, one condition of our dating was that I learn her language — American Sign Language. Since that time, Janna — who happens to be Deaf — and I have written ASL books, performed together, and taught ASL together many times!

As ASL teachers, Janna and I believe in total immersion, and we also believe that in our real lives and in our classrooms. No English! No PSE! Just use pure ASL. You’ll learn, and sustain, a language better and faster that way.

I have done my best to apply that immersion thinking to my Italian learning. Complete and total immersion whenever possible. Some believe adults have a harder time learning a new language than a child, but I disagree. Adults know how to make associations with existing grammar, and syntax, and that gives adults the power of leveling up faster than our infant contemporary language learners!

Here is my Italian learning plan. When I’m not directly studying in my Apps, I am using the following methods to provide immersion as often as possible.

1. 1. TV. Comcast offers two Italian channels for an extra monthly fee. They also offer other foreign language channels like German and French!
   2. Radio App — talk and music. The iPhone store is filled with Italian streaming Apps. You can also stream directly from the internet.
   3. iPhone Language. I changed the language on my iPhone and iPad from English to Italian. Sure, it’s a little scary, but I have Janna’s English iPhone to help me out if I get stuck. I also changed the time to a 24-hour clock.
   4. Keyboard language on phones and computers. I use an Italian keyboard whenever I can. That’s my new default. Force it to learn it!
   5. Apple Watch. I changed the language on my Apple Watch to Italian. Force it to learn it!
   6. Podcasts. Listening to podcasts can also really help you learn Italian fast.
   7. Music. Singing along is a great, modern, way to learn a musical language to a beat. Melody sharing makes the learning less traditional, and more exciting!
   8. TV shows. YouTube has a lot of Italian learning shows. They are helpful! Episodic television is also a wonderful way to add familiar context to the Italian overdubbing.
   9. Movies. Netflix has Italian content with English captions.
   10. CiborTV. This is a box you buy, like an Apple TV, that provides subscription content for Italian television channels. CiborTV is my greatest secret weapon for ongoing daily passive immersion.

One of the biggest blockades to learning Italian is the four years I spent learning Spanish 45 years ago. When I “think” in my target language of Italian, the dark memory of the Spanish word first creeps to mind. I never became fluent in Spanish! I regret not studying harder all those years ago. Senorita Byrd: “I apologize for not being a more apt student!”

For my Italian study, I subscribe to several Italian language newspapers, but my main weapon in learning is my Apps. Here is a review — on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best — of the Italian language learning Apps I use every day. I study a minimum of 90 minutes a day using these Apps. I have, probably 25 Apps in total, but these particular Apps provide a lifetime subscription: Buy once, learn forever! That, to me, is important in learning a new language, because you will always, for your lifetime, be working on learning the language. Apps that charge only a monthly, or a yearly fee, are not included in this review.

Babbel (3/10)
Babbel does a lot of television advertising. Their learning quit on me when a lesson I was studying stopped working. The problem was repeatable. I reported to Babbel the trouble I was having, along with steps to reproduce the bug, and screenshots — you can’t move on until you finish a lesson, and I was forever stuck on a blank screen for Lesson 7 — and Babbel support brushed me off! They told me to restart my browser. I stopped right there and gave up on Babbel. That is the danger of paying once with access forever. If you can’t access the lessons, there is no forever — and the company, after being paid, has zero incentive to keep you actively learning! There are also no study guides you can print out for each lesson to help you memorize the work. The problem was 100% confirmed on the Babbel side, and they did not care. 

LingoDeer (5/10)
LingoDeer sells itself as an Asian language learning App, but they do offer a few other languages, like Italian. So far, their strict learning style is often effective. Their printable notes are comprehensive and helpful. The teaching style is raw, though. I call LingoDeer the “meaner sister of Duolingo.” The early lessons were super difficult and unforgiving, now the later lessons are a little more relaxed and fun to “play.”

Rosetta Stone (4/10)
Rosetta Stone is the old dude in the room and uses a visual learning approach. There are no printable lessons. You look at images and divine vocabulary and grammar all on your own. Alone, Rosetta Stone would not be a great way to learn a language, but adding it to the ganglia of other learning tools I have employed, it’s a definite winner in making one “think different” in real time. Their spoken language recognition engine is pitiful. It does not work. I have, unfortunately, turned off its voice feature after week 6.

Lingopie (8/10)
Lingopie is super interesting and immersive. They provide videos with both English and Italian captions. You can turn off the captions if you don’t want to see them. If you don’t know a word, you click on it, and that word gets defined for you and added to your Pop Quiz queue. There’s also a Netflix browser plugin that will “Lingopie” Italian content on Netflix that will help you learn even faster. Lingopie will only get better with time!

Clozemaster (10/10)
Clozemaster is my favorite learning tool — it thinks, and processes information, just as I do — and that’s a rare thing to find in the real world! Designed like a retro-style 80s video game, Clozemaster helps you quickly close in on your target language goals. ChatGPT-4 explains the idea behind “cloze” learning:

A “cloze” test is used in language learning and pedagogy to assess an individual’s comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar skills. It is a valuable tool for both educators and students in various language learning contexts.

In a cloze test, certain words or phrases within a text are systematically removed and replaced with blanks. The learner is then asked to fill in the blanks with appropriate words or phrases to complete the sentences. The omitted words are usually chosen based on specific criteria, such as every nth word or specific grammatical structures.

Here’s how the cloze method is applied in language learning:

1. **Assessment of Vocabulary and Grammar**: By strategically removing certain words or phrases, teachers can assess a student’s grasp of vocabulary and grammatical structures. For example, removing verbs can test understanding of verb tenses.

2. **Reading Comprehension**: Cloze tests can be tailored to evaluate a student’s ability to understand context and meaning within a text. By choosing which words to omit, a teacher can measure specific reading comprehension skills.

3. **Promoting Contextual Learning**: Unlike isolated word lists, cloze tests promote learning words and structures in context, allowing students to understand how they are used in real communication.

4. **Differentiated Instruction**: Teachers can modify the difficulty of a cloze test based on the needs and abilities of individual students, making it a flexible tool for different learning levels.

5. **Integration into Various Language Skills**: Cloze tests can be integrated into reading, listening, writing, and speaking exercises, making them a multifaceted tool for comprehensive language learning.

6. **Feedback and Reflection**: The immediate feedback provided by cloze tests helps students recognize their mistakes and reflect on their understanding, thus fostering continuous improvement.

In summary, cloze tests provide a practical, adaptable, and effective way to evaluate and enhance various aspects of language learning. They promote contextual learning and provide a multi-dimensional approach that can be tailored to individual student needs.

For a scholarly insight into the subject, you may refer to the book “Cloze Procedure: An Alternative Approach to Reading in Foreign Language Training” by J.H. Robinson (1980), which provides an in-depth analysis of the application of cloze in foreign language training.

Drops (9/10)
Drops was a magnificent surprise. Drops focuses on helping you learn Italian vocabulary in just 5 minutes a day. You can study for a longer period of time if you pay. Drops is fun to use, beautiful to look at, and a wonder at teaching. It’s just fun! I start my day with Drops to give myself a boost of confidence, and joy, before the harder work of learning begins.

Memrise (6/10)
Memrise is a strange beast. I’m not completely certain I understand what it is or what the goals are of the App. You sometimes get video clips of phrases — some are just silly, and I skip them — which you then get tested on in multiple choice boxes. They also provide a strange “video” conversation with people talking to themselves — like a TikTok story — that I find more annoying than engaging. Memrise does have a ChatGPT-3 dialogue interaction that can be fun, but even that feels just a little old and limited.

edX (1/10)
I was super excited to take the Italian lessons on edX, but the teaching is really old — the expert Italian language folks on Reddit told me many of the words being taught on edX were no longer colloquial, and they urged me to dump the lessons, and I did. The learning interface feels like a 1990s website project gone wrong. There was so much unlimited promise here that just failed to deliver.

Anki (3/10)
People either seem to love Anki flashcards or they hate them. I’m sort of in the middle. I get how Anki can be helpful for repetition in learning, but the interface is super ugly, and many of the “study decks” for download don’t appear to be well-formatted. The idea is right, but the execution feels stilted and raw.

That’s my review of my “lifelong learning Italian Apps” with a lifetime subscription. I look forward to learning Italian. My goal is to be at least B2 certified and I’m currently a rising A1. Yes, I have a long way to go, but that’s okay. Good things take time, and fluency demands dedication. I know I have at least one of both right now.

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#anki #asl #asl-opera #babbel #chatgpt #cloze #clozemaster #drops #e4e4e4 #edx #fluency #immersion #italian #lingodeer #lingopie #memrise #opera #opera-project #rosetta-stone

https://bolesblogs.com/2023/08/14/learning-italian-lifetime-immersion-style/

Bravo Disco Fever 79, Germany, 1979 -Bravo is a German youth magazine-. Concert featuring the Bay City Rollers, and former Bay City Roller Ian Mitchell with his band Rosetta Stone.
.
#Disco #Germany #BayCityRollers #IanMitchell #RosettaStone #Advertisement #Retro #Music #vintage

Can anyone express an informed opinion about some new / great ways for a Canadian to learn some Italian? I used Rosetta Stone many years ago for some very basic "tourist Italian", but would like to prepare a little more for an upcoming trip. It seems Babbel is the leader these days, but I wonder if there's something hiding in the bushes. I should add-- it really needs to be self paced, and I don't want to mess around with free approaches (I'm too old to figure some of that out, or risk getting something wrong), so DuoLingo may not be an option (but I might be convinced). #italianlanguage #languagelearning #languages #babbel #rosettastone #duolingo

A #geometry masterpiece: #Yale prof solves part of math’s #RosettaStone.

Yale’s #SamRaskin has solved a major portion of a math question that could lead to a translation #theory for some areas of #math.

❛❛ The [Robert] #Langlands Conjectures … suggested in the 1960s that deep, unproven connections exist between #numbertheory, harmonic analysis & #geometry — 3 areas of math long considered distinctly separate. ❜❜

🔗 https://news.yale.edu/2024/11/01/geometry-masterpiece-yale-prof-solves-part-maths-rosetta-stone 01 Nov 2024
🔗 https://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Langlands_program

#KrononautMoon

The true meaning of the Rosetta Stone.

#RosettaStone #BritishMuseum

After they found this … everything was totally easy after that!🍸😹 #RosettaStone

Listening to the new album from Rosetta Stone, and I'm back in a Goth club in the 1980s. Keeping the vibe alive. 🦇

(Ok I was never cool enough - or old enough - to be in a Goth club in the 80s, but I was listening to Bauhaus and Siouxie on community radio 4ZZZ. And I did listen to early Sisters a lot in the 90s, if that helps.)

Dose Makes The Poison - Rosetta Stone

https://rosettastoneuk.bandcamp.com/album/dose-makes-the-poison

#RosettaStone #GothRock #GothicMusic #NowPlaying

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum: ‘We can’t give things away, but there is nothing preventing us from sharing the collection’.

The 48-year-old Briton just completed his first year as head of the institution, and is faced with carrying out its biggest renovations ever.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20250824-nicholas-cullinan-director-of-the-british-museum-we-cant-give-things-away-but-there-is-nothing-preventing-us-from-sharing-the-collection?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward

#BritishMuseum #NicholasCullinan #Museum #History #Culture #UK #ParthenonMarbles #ElginMarbles #BeninCity #RosettaStone

ROSETTA STONE - Dose makes the poison (2025, full album)
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k6NO2V05BFQchC1N2qgsmm_MESr1hP4vM&si=Z1usWZhU2sd3xuuE

#gotjicrock #rosettastone #porlking

ROSETTA STONE - Source neutral (2025)
https://youtu.be/MThp_7d963Y?si=bjGu8xzcDHNMWLPK

#gothicrock #rosettastone