A list of books of reference in the reading room of the British Museum / Printed by order of the Trustees.

  • British Museum. Department of Printed Books.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A list of books of reference in the reading room of the British Museum / Printed by order of the Trustees. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    was opened for the purposes of inspection and study, was to make arrangements for the reception of stu- dents. On the 8th of December, 1758, the Trustees ordered “ that the corner room in the base story be appro- priated for the reading-room, and that a proper wainscot table, covered with green bays in the same manner as those in the libraries, be prepared for the same, with twenty chairs of the same kind with those already pro- vided for the several departments of the house.’' On the 22 nd of the same month Dr. Peter Tern pieman, the trans- lator of Norden’s Travels in Egypt, and who afterwards became the secretary to the then newly-incorporated Society of Arts and Commerce, delivered in his appointment as “ Keeper of the Reading Room or Rooms in the British Museum.” The appointment of such an officer had been ordered on the 23rd of the June preceding, the Trustees wisely foreseeing the importance of the Reading-Room, and the necessity of providing for its efficient superintendence. A corner room in the basement story, with one oak table and twenty chairs, forms a very striking contrast with the Reading-Room of the present day, but it was not so bad as the indulged reader of modern times may imagine. A glass door opened from this Reading-Room into the garden of Montagu House, which was well cultivated and planted with goodly trees, and between which and Hampstead nothing intervened to obstruct the prospect or poison the air.* We may smile now at the twenty chairs, but they * “After the establishment of the Museum in Montagu House, Mr. [afterwards Sir William] Watson was very assiduous, not only in the internal arrangement of subjects, but also in getting the garden fur- nished with plants, insomuch that in the first year of its establishment in 1756 it contained no fewer than 600 species, all in a nourishing state.”—Pulteney's Sketches of Botany, 1790, vol. ii. p. 310.