The Guardian view on the British Library: don’t privatise the reading rooms

Summary

Cybercriminals are to blame for the current crisis. But renting out study space will not lead to recovery It holds two copies of Magna Carta , the charter that set limits on royal power in 1215. It has the sole surviving manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and notebooks by some of the most beloved authors in the English language: Jane Austen, William Blake, Virginia Woolf. Also in the British Library’s red-brick London building is the original, illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – given as an early Christmas gift to Alice Liddell in 1864. On handwritten drafts of…

Description from The Guardian.